AbleBrains

Appealing to Man & Beast: Neuromarketing Strategies

As a former neuroscientist, Neuromarketing is close to my heart. At its essence, its leveraging how consumers store, represent and respond to information about a product or service in their heads. And to do so in such a way as to stimulate reactions in the key areas of the brain.  And because we react differently to stimuli in our world, dependent on which neurological structure is activated, its important to understand the brain and its functions.

The evolution of the brain occurred in three primary stages (image courtesy of Noah Laith's blog). The most rudimentary component of the brain- and the oldest is the Reptilian brain, where basic impulses, instincts and even our rituals reside.  It helps us meet very fundamental needs -  to survive, to dominate our environment and to mate.

The second stage of neural evolution was the development of the Limbic system - the mammalian brain. The Limbic system is the seat of emotion and bonding.  When a child is attaching to a parent, its the Limbic system that's highly active.  The stronger the emotional charge connected to a perception (or a Brand), the quicker a person can retain that information in long-term memory. And the easier that information is to retrieve.

The most recent evolution of the human brain is the Neocortex, where rational thought, logic, reasoning, and language resides. 

The act of buying and owning anything has emotional, instinctual and rational elements to it. Buying a car, for instance, evokes strong emotional responses from our brains, especially our reptilian brain. Own or have a passion for a Hummer?  It's a war machine. It says if you want to fight, I can fight.   SUVs evoke similar feelings in individuals. In the neocortex, where rational thought resides, we all realize that tall SUVs are more likely to roll over than a smaller car. Yet the reptilian brain,  feels that being up higher makes you feel bigger and taller, and thus safer.  There's a constant struggle within our different brain structures when we are marketed to.  That's why successful neuromarketing evokes powerful thoughts, emotions and responses in each major functional area in the brain. 

Products, brands and marketing programs which appeal to all three evolutionary components of the brain outperform those which don't.  The goal of which  is to move the consumer closer to buying the product by leveraging positive memories of the product and  the emotion associated with it. 

Memory is important because if  the brand or product isn't memorable, you won't buy it and you won't tell someone else about it. Emotion is important because all perceptions go through the amygdala, the seat of emotion, before they go to the cortex . The amygdala checks all perceptions for emotional relevance. The stronger the emotion, the more we pay attention to it.  To make our brand part of your customer’s social identity, we have to make our customers feel different than the people who use competitive solutions. The sharper the distinction (even if in real terms it’s not all that meaningful), the more effective this strategy will be.

The LexisNexis  Real Law Campaign  is one of our top performing campaigns to date.  Why?  Its infused with neuromarketing principles.  Each campaign, besides having a content marketing element, has what we call, a Real Law Haiku, a three pronged argument which is structured to appeal to a rational, emotional and instinctual thought process. As an example,   

"This is waking up at 5 AM" (purely an emotional appeal...we all know what it feels like to have to wake up early and if you do, how motivated you are)

"This is creating the perfect argument on behalf of your client" (a logical appeal)

"This is winning your case" (a reptillian appeal to dominate, and an emotional appeal related to the rewards that come from winning)

This approach is then followed up on the Real Law hub where individuals can read posts that appeal to them on a variety of cognitive levels, emotional, logical and impulsive/instinctual.  This content management strategy is critical to successful neurmarketing.  

So if you're not thinking about appealing to the human and beast in your marketing efforts, its time to start... its the human thing to do.

The Intersection of Marketing and User Experience

The pace of change in the online world is causing organizations to struggle to keep up with their online interactions with their customers. More and more of these interactions happen nowadays via the Interweb.  While these digital interfaces serve consumers everywhere, the user experience these consumers have shapes how they view the brands in their lives.  These visual interfaces and the user experiences they convey represent the the digital persona of a given brand. This means that the role of a Marketing Executive is more difficult and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before.

First off, consumer expectations are much higher.  Many folks have lost patience with technology… they don’t want to learn, they want to do! To use technology that performs to expectations whether it’s a TiVo, a Mac Book Pro, iPad or TouchPad (whoops no worries about that device any more).  This impatience with user experiences has extended well beyond the consumer sphere and into enterprise applications as well.

Why is this happening??? Its because we have made great gains in user experience in the consumer space that individuals have expectations that those experiences be as engaging and intuitive in their work environments and why not?  It’s an entirely reasonable expectation.  The question you have to ask and answer is:  How can I as a marketer connect customers to my brand and by influencing product developments inspire lasting engagement?

Digital Interfaces live on and on

While marketing campaigns can change at a rapid pace, digital interfaces can live for years, sometimes decades, before undergoing major identity changes. SaaS solutions can change much more rapidly but do you want that?  If you change an interface too quickly, the user will never master the interface and guess what… they’ll be just as frustrated with a continually evolving interface as one that’s just plain awful to use.  Visual interfaces need to express and utilize what I like to call Iconic Implicature – a sense of intuitiveness that occurs just by looking at the graphical representations in that interface as well as  timelessness – a consistency that the user can count on so that the digital persona of the brand isn’t constantly changing.

Because both on-premise and Web-based applications have become more complex, we must balance style with usability in interface design. A good interface is a humble servant of functionality, but this means we have less opportunity to show a strong visual identity. Instead, the identity must live in the visual details, and the interactivity and usability become the memorable experience that the end user is seeking. But what about the brand?  Well, the brand's identity can still be expressed through the consistency of that interface.  Therefore, as Marketing Execs its incumbent upon you to extend your brand guidelines to those things well beyond creation of  Direct Marketing or Email Marketing pieces but to the product themselves.  As the true digital persona of the brand, these guidelines should guide interface designers to develop a consistent look and feel to your solution that is consistent, reliable and fun!

If your marketing organization is NOT involved in the look and feel of the solution, then get a SEAT AT THE TABLE.

The Marketeers Takeaway

Good design drives users to be more engaged with brands but don’t forget that how a product behaves irrespective of design also influences users to either be engaged or not. If you don’t focus on simplifying the complexities of a given solution and you are totally focused on the design then its just lipstick on a bulldog. If you think about it, a product’s design sets expectations as to the functional capability and usability of a product – if the interface is kludgy and complicated, then folks think the behavior of the product will be kludgy and complicated. If its easy to use then users expect the behavior of the product to be easy as well.  To understand where on this ease of use continuum your product should reside means having a thorough understanding of your customer (more on this in another post).

As product marketers, if you were to recommend a completely simplistic and consistent experience you may miss entire segments of your market – that is to have your product speak to many different groups of users – each with unique goals and usage contexts. At the end of the day you will need to implement some sort of Experience strategy, which will enable you to define an interface for multiple market segments and multiple user types, yet still, using a standards-based guidelines approach to developing user experiences.  

 

Why Should Marketers Care About Creating and Marketing Terminology?

The EI's have been discussing the importance of branding the term "cloud."  The actual question posed to the group was: 

Since everyone is “cloud” today curious to see how everyone views it in the market.  Is it becoming passé or in the words of Gartner has it entered the “drought of disillusionment”? 

How important (or not) is cloud in a company’s marketing today?

Inquiring minds want to know…

Which is a great question and we had robust discussion on the various definitions of cloud and its importance in bringing a cloud-based solution to market.  But it begs a rather important issue... namely how important is it to define terms for a market? 

If you're a technology vendor... very.  Afterall, as a vendor if you define terms such as "cloud-based" to align 100% with the solution your organization brings to market then, as a vendor, one of your marketing claims can obviously be that your organization provides a 100% cloud-based solution.  If you're buyer has a technical bent, this could be very important to their buying process.

If you're an influencer of any ilk, its also extremely important. Afterall one of your jobs is to educate and to demonstrate your insight regarding a market, business model, technology, trend etc... You're being paid for your smarts...so again defining terms for your clients/readership is important. 

What about you purists out there?  Well if you care about creating and promulgating objective definitions of technologies or products then hell yeah, you want to get those definitions out there.

But if your thing is taking products to market... is defining terminology important?  Well of course... but why?  Well, I can think of two very good reasons...

(1) If you're role is to drive inquiries for your demand funnel, one of the key ways to stuff the top of the demand funnel is through market education... defining a promising term is valuable in that regard. 

(2) But there's an even better reason... the best, surest way to win is not by going head to head in a crowded market but to create a new category of market, a new category of product, something your prospective customer absolutely has to have.  To create a new category requires an extensive investment, not only in the product but in your go-to-market strategy. It demands a level of investment in market education and market building that is heavy but is sooo worth it because if done right, you're the only one in that market category and guess what, you're the leader!

An obvious example of category-building is what Apple has done, not only with the MP3 player market but by rejuvenating the Tablet market -- both were category building exercises and both have paid impressive dividends.  The reason I believe customers are struggling with the market category of "cloud-based solutions" is that no one provider has created a compelling set of truths around this market definition.  I think there a number of competing market truths out there. 

But at the end of the day the only definition that's truly important is what's in your customer's head, so as marketers you should "vote early and vote often"... with every communication help your prospective customer to build an intelligent definition of the products that match your solutions. 

Can Marketo Give Marketers Some Cred?

Some of the EI's took a briefing today from Jon Miller, Co-founder and VP of Marketing for Marketo.  Jon briefed us on their new product - Revenue Cycle Explorer, which purports to be able to accurately analyze ROMI - your Return on Marketing Investment.  Jon says CMO's are asking him and the Marketo team to help them be credible to their colleagues.  Credible by being seen as an intricate part of the revenue acquisition team - not just the arts and crafts guy.

It really is just what marketers need.   They do need a tool which will enable them to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns in real dollars and can be used to hold the CMO accountable for a revenue oriented target in the same way that a head of sales would be.

What it does

The solution provides analytics around what the conversion rates are in each stage of the demand funnel. It also enables organization to customize business rules around their particular demand funnel, for instance, what happens if sales rejects a Marketing Qualified Lead, or when should a prospect be placed in  Nurturing bucket.

I asked Jon if they were taking the application in the direction of Predictive Analytics so that Marketers can forecast revenue in the same way that sales leads already do.  Sure enough we were shown mock-ups of yet to be released (or developed?)  predictive analytics packages.  Further with the analytics already provided Marketo enables customers to create predictive models of conversion and transitions from stage to stage. 

The Hurdle

I think Marketo's biggest problem isn't Eloqua, their main competitor, nor is it bringing their products to market. I think its the state of enterprise data.  Many marketing organizations do not have clean data marts that they can leverage to perform this type of analysis. Nor can they even agree on the stages of their demand funnel.  Many times its a mess and until and unless you have a unified strategy and platform for managing marketing data, it ain't gonna work without a lot of effort.

I do agree though that Marketing leads are looking for more credibility with their executive colleagues.  Too many times marketers have been relegated to the arts and crafts aspects of marketing simply because they didn't have a quantitative platform from which to measure the marketing organization's effectivness.  If I were a CMO right now, I'd be considering a marketing analytics platform such as what Marketo showed me today. Good stuff!

Google Instant makes SEO Irrelevant? Who cares?

Steve Rubel makes an the argument that Google Instant will kill SEO because:

Here's what this [Google Instant] means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.

Searches will be more unique -- Agree

When you get feedback, you change your behavior -- Agree

Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results - Big deal

Search has always been a very personalized engagement with the Web. Just because people will be tweaking their searches does not mean that that search isn't part of a common cluster of search terms that folks use.  How many different ways can one search for a restaurant in Aspen Colorado?  There are just so many terms that one can use.  So I don't believe that search will kill SEO. Pulling from Bob Warfield's blog...Even the Google Smarter Predictions folks say, “Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, we will push you in the direction of what the masses are looking for.  We will perturb search in the direction of sameness.”  Again, there are masses of same search types out there which one could optimize around.

The more fundamental question is... should you have even been bothering with SEO to begin with?  After all, as Bob Warfield points out, its content that's king.

For marketing, content trumps SEO and links back to your site.  That’s not to say there is no value in SEO or links, just that if you have to choose or prioritize, content is at the top of the heap.  If you’re a big company, you can probably choose to invest in all with far more resources than perhaps are even needed.  But the smaller your budget, the more likely you had better choose and make the right choice.  Pssst: the right choice is Content!

Regarding SEO being marginalized, Bob argues:

If, instead of feedback changing behaviors to be less predictable as Rubel implies, it actually makes the behaviors more predictable because we are guided to sameness, SEO is still dead, but for a much less interesting reason.  This sameness makes it much harder to game.  You can no longer count on the Long Tail queries to help you out when you can’t secure the top spots on the common queries.  It is a repressive tax on the Long Tail, in other words.

Agree that you can't game the SEO system easily with Google Instant, although search providers have been making it harder to game the system for years now.  So.. forget about Google Instant making SEO irrelevant.  You can still optimize around those "sameness  clusters" and focus on driving traffic with your compelling content. 

Augmented Reality. Will it ever become a part of the marketing technology mix?

There was a lot of buzz about new visualization techniques back in 2009. About a year ago, Mashable posted on an Apple patent called Apple ID:

[it] recognizes an object based on visuals (through the iPhone’s camera), a RFID reader or through GPS, and then fetches the data from related databases. I like to imagine all this happening in real-time, with a layer of visual information superimposed on the actual camera image, but in the beginning it’ll probably just take you to a related Wikipedia page. Still, it’s a start.

What's being described is Augmented Reality (AR) - in which information is paired with, merged and displayed with a real time, real world image.  Here's a fun example.  This augmented reality app displays information on where the nearest London Tube station can be found.

And here's an app called Wikitude, an augmented reality browser created by Mobilizy, an Austrian startup.

So kinda cool stuff has it evolved? And does it make business sense? Will Augmented Reality ever become part of the marketing mix?  Will it become a standard arrow in the quiver for marketers?  And all on the back of the more than 4.1 billion mobile devices out there.

1. Imagine a company like Bazaarvoice not only instrumenting a client's web site to provide ratings and reviews of their products but enabling a broad swath of its client base to have those reviews accessed  at brick and mortar outlets.  Or even getting reviews of theme park rides when the kids insist they won't be able to go on living unless you take them to Disney World?
2. Serve up interactive offers when scanning products at a retail outlet or even a billboard -- "get 20% off this widget when you use promo code XYZ."
3. For you B2B types, how about a complete merging of virtual and real time events enabling interaction of both audience types with one another.
4. Using AR to see how clothes and accessories would look on you without having to even have the accessory or item of clothing in hand

Marketers are already blurring the lines between the type of AR described above and what I would call AA (don't even go there!) -- Augmented Animation, in which real-world images are being used on a web site in an animated fashion.  Example? Wise potato chips created a marketing campaign called Rock the Cheez! that asks customers to print out and cut out small squares from a web site and put them in front of their web cam. The square is then animated on the web site and the consumer can produce a video.  I think the notion of animating real-life objects is both a clever and engaging marketing strategy but its not Augmented Reality to my way of thinking.

Clearly, there's a place for true AR in marketing.  As the data stream surrounding products gets richer, AR becomes more applicable.  Its no longer a matter of "if", its a matter of "when."

Yes, Content Trumps SEO & Links But Get Your Technical House In Order

Bob Warfield, a fellow Enterprise Irregular writes a great post about how superior content trumps SEO and links as a means of driving traffic:

For marketing, content trumps SEO and links back to your site.  That’s not to say there is no value in SEO or links, just that if you have to choose or prioritize, content is at the top of the heap.  If you’re a big company, you can probably choose to invest in all with far more resources than perhaps are even needed.  But the smaller your budget, the more likely you had better choose and make the right choice.  Pssst: the right choice is Content!

But to do content right?  You need two things (1) an honest-to-goodness content strategy and (2) the right technology infrastructure to deploy on... you just can't throw content out there and expect it to work for you.

Strategy

You have strategies for everything else in your business, why not for your hard working content? A content strategy must be in lockstep with the progression of your business as it moves through its cycles.  You need to sit down and map out those cycles and how your content will interlink to easily demonstrate how your  products and services make your client's lives easier.  You need to decide what value for value exchanges you will make with your visitors - for instance, is there any content that is behind a registration wall?    Where should you use video, product demos, graphics vs. the written word?    The end goal is to create a superior customer experience that will drive demand.  Without the smooth ability to move a prospect down the demand funnel then your efforts are for naught.  Your content strategy, which includes, nurturing and the specific touches that you give a prospect are all meant to move your visitor down the demand funnel by giving them the answers to their questions.

Technology

The technology you select to create, serve and manage your content is critically important, especially if you want to exploit your tight marketing budget and ensure you have an effective content reuse strategy in place.   The tools of the trade that you need at a minimum include:

1. Component Content Management Systems - enables you to manage core content at a particularly granular level. We're not talking about a document such as a white paper but down to the paragraph, sentence or even the word if your business calls for it.  Think of the CCMS as the central repository of all core content that an organization uses no matter which channel its to be sent thru.  The CCMS make content reuse a reality.  Without it there is no content reuse or at least very limited.   Utilizing a CCMS enables you to store your content once in a single trusted environment.   Doing this also drives consistency of voice. Many clients I have spoken to complain about how disparate their "corporate voice" is.  How each division seems to speak differently to the market.   A CCMS and the appropriate rules and processes for content use dramatically reduce this issue as it enforces content standards. 
2. Digital/Media Asset Management Systems enable organizations to store and manage content at the asset level - a document, a video, an audio file, photographs etc. Asset types are keyed off of metadata descriptions of the asset in question.   Some Enterprise Content Management systems (we'll get to those in a moment) subsume DAM functionality within them obviating the need for a DAM implementation. 
3. Web Content Management - is a system for authoring and managing web site content.   Many of these systems not only allow one to easily edit content and manage it but allow you to output executable HTML, JSP, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion or PERL pages as well. Smart systems store their content in XML thereby ensuring content reuse along multiple fronts by separating content from its presentation.  WCM functionality can be subsumed into a an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system as well.
4. Enterprise Content Integration can be found as part of a middleware integration stack that's used to integrate all your content-related systems together.  You'd want this primarily for managing content in multiple databases or repositories as well synchronizing and searching across such databases.  Content Integration middleware also enables your organization to publish content out of your content management system thru multiple channels.
5. Web Analytics - are measurement packages which collect and analyze user behavior on a site so that the site can be optimized to make it easier for visitors to find the information they are seeking. Such a tool is also used to understand movement through a site to see if it can be made more user-friendly thus improving navigation and pathing thru the site.  These tools can also help you understand the how your marketing campaigns are working by analyzing the number of visitors to unique landing pages and how those pages are performing in terms of funneling prospects toward conversion.
6. Search - what good is content if you can't find it?  Powerful and effective Search must be in place so that those absorbing your content can actually find what they are looking for.
7. Enterprise Content Management - is a set of related systems and processes which are used to create, manage, archive and deliver content and documents to the appropriate internal or external channel.  But its not always a clean and simple set of technologies. ECM sometimes represents the above set of best of breed solutions cobbled together to form a complete ECM solution or it can refer to a pre-integrated suite of solutions. Suite-based ECM providers typically cover functionality such as:

• Document Management
• Web CM
• Content authoring
• Content versioning
• Digital/Media Asset Management
• Forms generation
• Publishing
• Archiving
• Workflow
• Script generation

This is the Minimum Equipment List to manage your content effectively but yes, there's much more and as your strategies evolve, say to include personalization - the identification of a unique visitor and the serving of dynamic content personalized to their preferences, then you'll need additional technical solutions to meet those needs as well.

What's Your Favorite Position?

Calm Down!!!! Here's an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Storming the Castle, in which we're discussing what it takes to create powerful positioning and the first steps for initial market entry. As always comments are more than welcome.

We’re onto the fifth major milestone in our customer-centric GTM quest -- Initial Market Penetration.  But before you can penetrate a market you have to develop your favorite positioning.

All Positioning is created in fact by your team.  Or is it? How often do you use your customers to create positioning?  I don’t just mean the occasional focus group.  I’m talking about deep engagement with your customer and prospect base, prior to the launch of an initial market entry campaign or Demand Generation plan.

Developing Your Message House

I bet most of you have done this.  Developed a set of core positions and supporting messages.  There’s even a formula for developing such positions and it goes something like this: 

Our XYZ product is the best in the market because of capabilities, A, B and C.  Unlike our competitors who can’t do A, B and C and also are unable to deliver [insert weakness here] our solutions will deliver to you [insert benefit here]. 

Any way you look at it, that's the organizations have been taught to develop a positioning statement and then customize it to different markets and segments.  This is more exercise however, rather than usable content.   It needs to be adapted to specific channels depending on your Routes to Market.  On top of that, you need effective Competitive and Market Intelligence to identify those nuggets of information that will enable you to craft a compelling position. But beware, my guess is that your solution is NOT that much better/different/unique than that of your competitors.

But what you say about your solution and the feelings you can generate with your positioning IS important. Take a ride with me, back to 1990-1991, when PeopleSoft introduced its Fat Client/Server HRMS.   How cool was that graphical user interface?  How fun was it to use?  Much of their positioning back then was all about the fun, easy to use, productive interface they were providing and less about the core HRMS functionality.  Granted, they had first mover advantage but still, the users had serious feelings about and for PeopleSoft.  They were evangelists!

They felt that the organization "understood them” that PeopleSoft "got" HR professionals and their desire to have powerful easy to use tools (and they were right).  The goal was to evoke feelings of value, capability, and loyalty, which would translate into brand affinity and an evangelical avarice for the brand.  And don't just think you have to have a "cool" product for customers to have feelings for.  Anything that they can get passionate about - including things like software which can make their lives' easier is a recipe for generating good feelings.

Customer-Centric Positioning

Here are some key questions you should be answering as you construct your positioning. 

1. Do you have the ability to tell the market how your customers feel about your products and solutions? 
2. Have you ever asked customers how they feel about your products, services and brand? Not just a few but a whole slew of 'em
3. Have customers been included in your positioning efforts this time around so that their feelings and value attributes can be shared broadly? Have you run any draft positioning past them?
4. Is there a standard way you include customer “feelings” in your positioning efforts?
5. How integrated is your Market Intelligence function in crafting positioning?
6. Do you have a legitimate method for garnering human intelligence on competitive products that can then be integrated into your positioning efforts?

To successfully create customer-centric positioning you need to able have a 360 degree approach to including customers in the development, testing and in market usage of your positioning content. Addressing the items above are critical to driving that success.

Initial Market Entry

What do you do to find your "sneezers"?  Those folks who will spread the word on your products or services?  Do you invite them into early betas?  Do you have them play with your solutions in a private community?  There are three fundamental things that you should execute on to make your market entry efforts successful:

Communitize --  I am sure most of you have community efforts in place.  What an ideal place to start your market entry efforts... with your existing customers.  They will provide you with a bellwether as to how your customer base will accept the new solution or not.  And just as importantly, they will give you feedback on how the product is positioned. That is, if you ask for it. You see most organizations forget to do that.  In the absence of that crucial customer input you're missing an opportunity to fine tune your positioning and offer.  Another way to communitize your initial market entry is to set up a private community for the purposes of product testing and feedback.   Private communities give you the luxury of airing all the dirty laundry about your solution without fear of sharing that dirt with the market in general.  If you've read any of the other chapter excerpts you will know what a big believer I am in the use of private communities to test drive products, messaging and strategy.

Evangelize - once the product is in limited beta you should have both customer and employee evangelists lined up.   While employee evangelists are nice and they tend to move things along, I prefer customer evangelists.  Why? Because large swaths of your market likes hearing from customers more than they want to hear from you the vendor... why?  Simply because they are more credible in their eyes.  This is where those  communities come into play again. Many times you can recruit  a core set of evangelists from either your private or public community.

Incentivize - finally you should be incentivizing folks to try your products.  Whether it is with some sort of Freemium offer or just plain free for early users. Its up to you.  But you need to drive usage.  And the offer is beginning to become important here.  We haven't yet talked about Driving Demand but this is a Demand Generation activity - acquiring an early base of users.  We will. And the lessons we will discuss apply nicely here as well.

There's a lot more that we will be covering regarding how to get your product positioning and initial market penetration strategy in place but these are the bones.   We'll be putting meet on them as we move forward.

Where's the Personalization in the Enterprise Software Buying Experience?

Can someone please point me to all those great personalized B2B web sites?  You know the ones... they kinda ask you as you hit the home page who you are, gather some basic demographics/firmographics and then proceed to customize the content experience for you so you're more likely to find what you need.  

  I get that experience when I visit B2C web sites... Amazon for instance.  They've used past  behavior to craft a personalized experience for me that I enjoy.  And in the words of the man himself (from a 1998 interview):

 “In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge...to accelerate their discovery process.

If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well. And if they switch to a competitive website, as long as we never give them a reason to switch, as long as we're not trying to charge higher prices or providing lousy service, or don't have the selection that they require; as long as none of those things happen, they're going to stick with us because they are going to be able to get a personalized service, a customized website that takes into account the years of relationship we've built with them.”

How about that? ...

 ..."accelerate the discovery process" -> make it EASY and FAST to find the content that satisfies

..."feel a deep loyalty to us: -> Brand affinity is the crown jewel of a great customer experience

...acknowledging and building upon "the years of relationship we've built with them." 

If that's what can happen in B2C environment, don't you think some of that might be useful in B2B interactions?  Is there such a chasm in thinking between what works in a consumer oriented engagement vs. a B2B oriented engagement?  I guess so.

Name me an enterprise software play today that doesn't have years worth of relationships built up with the majority of their customers.   The millions of members of the community sites associated with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are a testament to those relationships. And these community sites are quite personalized. But what about the core web experiences of these organizations... and what about (hush!) the prospects?   

Don't they deserve to have an "individualized" experience as well? Why wouldn't they? Would you agree with me that most software today, regardless of provider has "right to play" functionality?  That the capabilities of various solutions whether on-premise or on-demand aim for "good enough" equivalency? Yes, I know a lot of you may have issues with that statement and I grant ahead of time that of course each vendor has a sweet spot (or is that a 'suite-spot' ?), or their technology aligns better with the prospect's IT environment or processes  or the look and feel appeals more (OK, have I covered all eventual issues now?). So if the functionality is roughly equivalent, don't these organizations stand apart from the pack based on relationship and ultimately Brand affinity? What was that Bezos was saying about customer loyalty? Oh yeah its the key to his business.

Most sales professionals I speak to tell me that its all about the relationship.  Its the relationship that sells the deal.  Customers say the same thing!  That being said, then the earlier a firm starts building that relationship with a prospective customer and the richness of those early building blocks are keys to winning the deal. Its about getting folks to the rich content they need as quickly as possible.  Its about creating an immersive and fun experience for the prospect, who when they finally leave your site say to themselves, "wow, they had exactly the content I was looking for" (read: they made my work life easier).  "I'm going to look at these guys more closely."

Personalization is not an end in and of itself.  Personalization is a cornerstone for relationship-building. Many times your a prospect's first impression of you is online.  Don't you want to put your best foot forward?

Evolutionary v. Intelligent Design Marketers: Which one are you?

To set the stage... I'm a scientist at heart.  Before I got into tech I was working on my PhD in neuroscience.  So its with healthy skepticism (a valuable trait in a scientist) that I looked at Intelligent Design - a reformulation of Creationism as the explanation for how we got here and where we are going.  Intelligent Design asserts that there is an "intelligent cause" -- some entity -- the Christian notion of G_d,  directing the growth of organisms as opposed to the process of Natural Selection which is the key process in evolution.   In natural selection, random genetic variation represent traits that are either advantageous to species survival or not. If they are advantageous they become more popular over generations.

From a marketeer's perspective, which camp do you consider yourself to be in?

Evolutionary Marketers

Well, do you believe that you should be injecting new talent into your marketing team regularly?  Do you recruit or collaborate with non-marketers AND customers to produce new positioning and ideas on how to take your product to market? How much effort is given over to innovating the marketing function at your firm? Do you give your teams the opportunity to experiment and FAIL then take learnings from that failure and use it to breed success?  Do you leverage scientific approaches to going to market?  If so then count yourself as an Evolutionary Marketeer - you believe in growing your organization in sometimes unexpected directions and you understand that some strategies are marketing dead ends, they won't go any where.. won't "perpetuate the species: -- your firm by driving Demand.  

Intelligent Design Marketers

Is your marketing "pre-ordained?"  Do you have a few folks directing the overall strategy without input from either the feet on the street, your customers or those responsible for execution? Are most of your marketing efforts coming out of some sort of play-book or recipe?  How often do you vary that recipe?  Hardly at all? Do you rely on the same talent -- virtually all of the time?  How much experimentation is there in your marketing activities?  Are you quantity driven as opposed to being quantity and quality driven?  If the majority of these attributes describe your marketing organization then you're an Intelligent Design Marketer.

Its a simple choice really. You can evolve and grow your marketing organization and keep your competitors off-balance.  Or you can execute well for a while until your competitor evolves some survival strategy that  vaults them into a position of market dominance while placing you into an evolutionary dead end. And we all know what that means... we'll be seeing your organization in the "Extinct Species Wing" of the museum.