Tag Archives: marketing

Publish Articles Promoting Better Management Using Open Journals

William Woodall shared this wonderful article he wrote with George E. P. Box with me, Innovation, Quality Engineering, and Statistics. My thoughts on being able to read it online:

Thanks Bill, it is a great article. And thanks for having it openly available. I really wish professors would stop allowing their work to be published by those seeking to close access to the ideas we are trying to promote. I realize there are pressures to publish in historically prestigious journals.

For professors that have “made it” you will do a great service to others (and help promote the ideas in your field that you have devoted your life to) by refusing to submit to closed science journals (or closed professional society journals etc.). For those trying to secure full professorships I wish they would too, but I realize the hard choices they face.

The maximum closed-ness we should tolerate, in my opinion, is closed access for 1 year after which it becomes open. Require this in writing in the agreement, don’t just accept that the current practice is to promote the sharing of ideas; if it isn’t in writing some person may have the publisher adopt closed science later and block access to the content you wanted to share.

It is especially distressing, to me, when government dollars fund the time the professor spends and then the end result is closed to the public. Thankfully some universities and some government agencies paying for the writing of these articles are demanding that the articles be published in an open access fashion.

On the other hand if you want to publish on rate and rank, the value of annual performance appraisals, bonuses for hitting targets etc. feel free to use closed science publishers.

Steve Jobs on Quality, Business and Joseph Juran

This webcast shows an interesting interview with Steve Jobs when he was with NeXT computer. He discusses quality, business and the experience of working with Dr. Juran at NeXT computer. The video is likely from around 1991.

America’s in a tough spot right now, I think. I think we have forgotten the basics. We were so prosperous for so long that we took so many things for granted. And we forgot how much work it took to build and sustain those basic things that were supporting out prosperity. Things like a great education system. Things like great industry.
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We are being out-planned, we are being out-strategized, we are being out-manufactured. It there is nothing that can’t be fixed but we are not going to fix it up here, we are going to fix it by getting back to the basics.

I agree with this thought, and while we have made some progress over the decades since this was recorded there is a long way to go (related: complacency about our contribution the USA has received from science and engineering excellence – when you were as rich as the USA was in the 1950s and 1960s more and more people felt they deserved to be favored with economic gifts without effort (forgetting the basics as Jobs mentioned) – Silicon Valley Shows Power of Global Science and Technology Workforce). After World War II the USA was able to coast on an economic bubble of extreme wealth compared to the rest of the world for several decades (and the economic success built during that period even still provides great advantages to the USA). That allowed wealthy living conditions even without very good management practices in our businesses.

Where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department.
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Quality isn’t just the product or service. Its having the right product. Knowing where the market is going and having the most innovative products is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product. And I think what we are seeing the quality leaders of today have integrated that quality technology well beyond their manufacturing.

Now going well into their sales and marketing and out as far as they can to touch the customer. And trying to create super efficient processes back from the customer all the way through the delivery of the end product. So they can have the most innovative products, understand the customer needs fastest, etc..

The importance of customer focus is obvious at the companies Jobs led. It wasn’t a weak, mere claim of concern for the customer, it was a deep passionate drive to delight customers.

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Pay Attention to the Results that Matter

Play pumps is a great sounding idea. Most people reading this blog have clean tap water a few steps away. Over a billion people today still struggle to get water every day. A common method to get water is using pumps to bring up water from deep in the ground.

Some energy is needed to bring up the water and that often mean people (at time wind energy is used). Most sites that are providing water to villagers don’t have integrated energy system that can be tapped to bring the water up – as most of those of the readers of this blog rely on (without having to think about it).

Play pumps had the idea of putting a merry-go-round on the site and letting children playing on it provide the energy. It sounded great and I wrote about it on my engineering blog. Many others found it exciting and funded it with tens of millions (The USA government, Steven Case foundation [AOL founder], )… Which is great.

Frontline, which is a great news organization, went back to look at the success of the program after much fanfare in the marketing of the program. Sadly the pumps are having many issues. The solution does not appear to have been executed well.

Several factors are extremely disappointing. There seems to be little customer focus. As with any enterprise that fails this basic tenet of good management this spells trouble. The maintenance process appears to be completely broken. In our throw away lives maintenance is often a minor project point. For bringing water to those without it maintenance is known to be the primary issue. For decades the failure of program has had this as the primary reason (the possible competition is corruption). Failing on the known largest issue is again extremely disappointing.
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Customers Are Often Irrational

Penney Pinching

“The first rule is that there are no irrational customers,” Drucker wrote in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “Customers almost without exception behave rationally in terms of their own realities and their own situation.”

“in terms of their own realities and their own situation.” is a huge caveat. Essentially plenty of customers behave irrationally – by any sensible definition of rational. I agree, to make them customers and keep them as customers you need to develop theories that can make sense of their behavior. And it doesn’t make sense to think if they behave irrationally that means randomly (chaotically, unpredictably, uncontrollably). Customers can be predictably irrational (as a group).

Seeing that people will choose* to fly lousy airlines because the initial price quoted is a little bit cheaper than an alternative (or because they are in a frequent flyer program) you can say the customer is behaving rationally if you want. Coming up with some convoluted way to make their decision, which based based solely on their desired outcomes (and cost factors etc.) is not rational, to be seen as rational seems like a bad idea to me. Instead figure out the models for how they fail to behave rationally.

They consistently chose an option they shouldn’t rationally want; in order to save some amount of money they don’t care about nearly as much as the pain they will experience. And the amount they will then complain about having to suffer because they chose to deal with the badly run airline. That isn’t rational. It is a common choice though.

The problem is not in thinking the customers are being irrational for not buying what you are selling. The problem is in thinking the customers will behave rationally. Your theory should not expect rational behavior.

There are plenty of other examples where customers make irrational decisions. I don’t think calling them rational (within the irrationality of their “own realities” makes sense). People will buy things because they think it is a better bargain to get the more expensive item that is the same, for more money, because originally the store charged more and now it is on sale. Anchoring isn’t an understanding of how people are rational. It is an understanding of how psychology influences people in ways that are not rational.

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Selling Quality Improvement

In this month’s ASQ influential quality voices post, Paul Borawski asks How Do You “Sell” Quality?

I am amazed how difficult it is to sell quality improvement. I look at organizations I interact with and easily see systemic failures due to faults that can be corrected by adopting management improvement strategies that are decades old. Yet executives resist improving. The desire to retain the comforting embrace of existing practices is amazingly strong.

What sells to executives are usually ideas that require little change in thinking or practice but promise to eliminate current problems. What Dr. Deming called “instant pudding” solutions sell well. They are what executives have historically bought, and they don’t work. I can’t actually understand how people continue to be sold such magic solutions but they do.

If you want to enable effective management improvement, as I do, you need to both have buyers for what you offer and offer something that works. Honestly I am not much of a salesperson. Based on what I see executives buy the sale should be packaged in a way that minimize any effort on the executive’s part. However, that doesn’t interest me because it nearly always leads to failed improvement efforts. For years (decades?) Dilbert has provided a humorous view on the continuing tragedy of these efforts.

Another sales option is look for desperate executives that have already tried taking the easy way out 5 or 6 or 7 times and are still in desperate for improvement. Once they can’t see any options offering simple solutions they may be willing to work at a solution.

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Networking is Valuable But Difficult to Quantify

Networking works incredibly well. Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as peddling your bike where you want to go. The benefits of networking are unpredictable and not easy to control (to specifically target – you can do this, it just has fairly uncertain results). So networking can seem like you put in all this effort peddling up hill day after day, month after month, year after year, and yet you never get to see the beautiful rainbow or end up at a wonderful ocean beach.

However it is well worth it, especially for those that have valuable skills and experience. To some extent it might work just to get opportunities anyone with a decent attitude could get. But networking is most effective, I think, when you have special skills that those in the community can share with those that have opportunities and give you a decent shot at a job. A big reason this works is that the job market is very inefficient – thus networking can greatly increase your odds (if it were efficient this would matter much much less).

I have been able to get jobs and consulting as a result of networking. It didn’t give me jobs, I couldn’t have gotten otherwise, but it allowed to know of opportunities, to be sought out by others, and to be seriously considered when I approached others.

I have long believed it is very valuable to build a personal brand online (for knowledge workers anyway). The return for doing so may well be difficult to measure. But it can definitely help open doors and give you opportunities for jobs and consulting.
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Steve Jobs Discussing Customer Focus at NeXT

Video from 1991 when Steve Jobs was at NeXT. Even with the customer focus however, NeXT failed. But this does show the difficulty in how to truly apply customer focus. You have to be creative. You have examine data. You have to really understand how your customers use your products or services (go to the gemba). You have to speculate about the future. The video is also great evidence of providing insight to all employees of the current thinking of executives.

Aligning Marketing Vision and Management

Why do so many companies market one thing and provide something else? I know it might be easier to sell something different than what you offer your customer today. But if you decide to market one vision, why don’t you change your organization to actually offer that?

I suspect this is substantially due to the outsourced nature of large marketing efforts. It makes sense to me that when you outsource your marketing message creation it isn’t tied to your management system and the two silos can pursue their own visions.

I would imagine marketers would claim they “partner” yada yada yada (and sometimes it actual seems to happen, but not often). As a consumer it sure looks to me like companies outsource marketing to ad agencies that come up with marketing plans that are not in harmony with the real company at all. I can understand putting a positive spin on things, but so much marketing is just completely at odds with how the company operates.

Treating a marketing message as something separate from management is a serious problem. When your marketing message says one thing and your customers get something else that is a problem. I think the message is often based on what the executives wish the company was (and the outsourced marketers think it should be), but it isn’t the customer experience the management system provides.

If you believe the vision of your marketing then make sure your organization has embraced those principles. I think, often, companies would be wise to follow the vision their marketers came up with. But instead they tell customers to expect one thing and manage the organization to provide something else. I just don’t see how that is sensible.

Online Data Backup and Corporate Blogging

This is a good example of a sensible corporate blog post, Online Data Backup [the broken link has been removed, breaking links is not a good practice for any website]. Their blog is fairly staid and impersonal (which is not normal for blogs) but as corporations take up blogging many such blogs are coming into being. blogs began as very personal communication vehicles, but that trait is not required (though completely impersonal blogs do not really seem like blogs at all). The balance between boring, pushy marketing and providing useful information while mentioning your services is a bit tricky and something different people have varying tolerances for.

According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. A Price Waterhouse Coopers survey calculated that a single incident of data loss costs businesses an average of $10,000.

Even if you are a home user, almost one third of you have lost all of your files due to circumstances beyond your control, like a hard disk drive crash. If you then tried to get a quote from a data recovery service, you likely gasped at the price. An estimate of $2,000 or more is quite common. Why? Because desperate people pay lots of money.

We all know we should backup our data, but most of us continue to put it off for a variety of reasons. It takes too long. We hate shuffling DVDs/CDs in and out. We’re too busy scheduling root canals at our respective dentists. Even if you’re vigilant about copying your data to a second storage location, how many of you, home or business user, can say that you have an off-site backup that will protect you in case of a fire or other natural disaster? I’ll bet good money that the answer is “not many.”

I think this post is successful at walking the balance between marketing and saying something worth reading. I would imagine others would find it too marketing focused. I think one focus a corporate blog needs to take is the purpose of the blog is to provide users useful and interesting information. Within that context highlighting offerings from the company is fine, but if providing value to the blog readers is not seen as the primary focus the blog is not going to be effective.

Also be sure those writing for, and making decisions about, the blog understand the technology and accepted practices of the blogging world. Coming off as some stilted, out-of-touch, outdated organization is probably not going to help the organization. One simple example is many blogs don’t even link out to studies etc. that they reference. This is a very lame practice (one the Lenovo site seems to employ). Such practices are common among those that don’t understand the internet (which is not a group you want to be in if you are publishing a blog). Also, as a reader, be very wary of statistics without context (such as those quoted above without providing links to the full reports).

Also, the blog post makes provides a good reminder, backup is important. This is valuable reminder, because it is an important thing to do, and because it is fairly commonly a weakness. Breathing is important too, but we don’t really need to remind people, they breath without reminders.

Some good corporate blog examples: Dell Innovation – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Management Training Program – Toyota’s Commitment – Blogging is Good for You – Visual Instructions Example (Seagate backup drive)

Using Free Content to Boost Your Sales

I am a big believer in marketing by providing some content for free. It is a great idea for consultants. It is also a great idea for those looking to sell books and audio-visual content.
Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can

As those crazy Monty Python dudes put it, “We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Similar approach worked for Nine Inch Nails and other artists. And yet, lately we hear more about various restrictions to free redistribution of copyrighted content than ever before.

If you are looking to create some business in the rough economy, try thinking creatively and expand your ideas of what is a good strategy for gaining customers. Providing sensible online resources is a far better strategy than hiring a bunch of lawyers to sue college students. I posted a link to Monty Pythons great explanation of what they were doing on one of my other blogs last November. Enjoy.