Over the past decade, I’ve been involved with many projects to “de-tangle” digital marketing for big companies. Big companies want to know what’s out there in the digital landscape, and how it all fits together. Most importantly, they want to know why the latest trend is important to them. Take Twitter, for example. Is it a real, honest-to-goodness life changer that will be used addictively by a whole generation of digital influentials? Or, will it be the Segway scooter of web 2.0, a tool in search of a solution, that enjoys a surge of activity followed by a slow decline into boredom and malaise? I won’t comment on Twitter (at least not for now), but I will mention a truly cool tool that could be very, very important for B2B marketers.

QR codes were invented in Japan in 1994 and are used a lot in Asia. They’re all over the place in India. The basic concept is simple—a mobile two dimensional barcode. Instead of putting barcodes on merchandise for use in payments, you can put them anywhere. Here’s what one looks like. This is the one for wikipedia's home page:



Microsoft’s biggest announcement at this weeks’ CES was their version of QR codes called Microsoft Tag. These are two-dimensional color codes that contain a lot of information and are very readable by mobile phones’ cameras. A key to adoption of these codes is ease. How close do you have to be to the code to take an accurate picture; how much light is necessary; how good does the camera have to be to pick out the contrasts in color. From what I’ve heard through some savvy friends, the new Microsoft technology is best-of-breed on all fronts. Here's what a Microsoft Tag looks like for B2B Marketing Confidential:





However, we’re back to the Segway question. Will this thing take off, and will it last? I think it will. For one thing, it’s taken off and lasted in the more mobile-phone-savvy countries already. For another, it’s got a lot of real, honest-to-goodness business applications. Microsoft points out several of these:

• Real Estate Listings: Snap a code of a for sale sign, take a virtual tour on your phone.
• Business Cards: Snap a code on a business card and download the person’s contact info.
• Dating: Print out a t-shirt with your code. If people are interested, they snap you and get your digits (my friend Jeremy came up with this, I agree, it’s a bit sick).
• Linking to Facebook / Twitter: Snap codes and people automatically see what you’re looking at and where.

There are lots of others that I’ve thought of for B2B marketers:

• Put codes on retail displays / end caps. Snap the code and you download a coupon and get loyalty points
• Put codes on all of your hardware components. Snap the code and you’re automatically routed to the best tech support person for that device, along with the device’s serial number and configuration.
• Put codes on drug posters. Snap the code and a doctor downloads all the clinical data and prescription guidance.
• Put codes all over at events. Snap the codes to create a customer event portfolio, complete with time visited. The sponsors also know who you are, who else you visited, etc.

There are probably 10,000 other applications. I came up with the above in three minutes; I think with some heads-down time you could come with many more meaningful B2B applications. So B2B marketers, start planning for mobile / QC codes in your planning. Some open questions:

• Is Microsoft going to out-innovate Google here for a change, or will Google release their much better version shortly and snap up all the share?
• What does this mean for GPS integration? Didn’t even go there but imagine that…
• Implications for privacy? Is there a way to streamline “opt-in”?

So, so cool. I don’t say stuff like this too often, but this is exciting.

Marketing is a word that has lost its meaning, and marketing is a discipline that has lost its way. When I say “marketing” to most people on the street, the first words that are mentioned are overwhelmingly negative. Marketing is thought of as “advertising”, “spam”, “pushy offers”, or “tricks”.

Here's an ironic and unlikely hypothesis--marketing accountability has driven this trend. This is meant to be a controversial statement. Marketing accountability, otherwise known as “ROMI (return on marketing investment) measurement”, has forced the marketing function into a single role driven by a single metric—driving incremental, short-term revenue. Of course, this is an oversimplification. Many companies think “long-term” and do care about their long-term customer relationships. But, there has been, over the past fifteen years, an undeniable trend toward the short-term profit-driven marketing function.

• At AOL, in the late-1990s, marketers pushed an obsolete product to customers with such relentless efficiency that the company’s infamous CD-ROMs became the gag in its own television ads.
• Through the 1990s and 2000s, credit card companies pushed a product to customers that they knew will destroy them in the long-run, unapologetically. Letter after letter came for pre-approved cards, even when customers are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
• Pharmaceutical companies have given in to a seemingly never-ending arms race of more direct-to-consumer advertising and more physician detailing, leading patients to develop a deep distrust of companies that keep them healthy.

This sounds borderline socialist, but I assure you, I'll get around to making money. The question, however, is whether marketing must be considered a “zero-sum game” where a company treats its customers as wells to be tapped as deeply as possible, as quickly as possible. In future posts on inbound, I will make the argument that this objective is deeply flawed and must be changed by companies across the landscape. The goal of marketing must became customer advocacy.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
A colleague of mine loves to talk about “inbound marketing”. The problem is, most marketers at big companies these days usually respond with a blank stare. For marketers at Fortune 500 companies, 90% of jobs are “outbound”—getting customers to buy stuff or feel a certain way. The inbound function is usually encapsulated in market research. But, even this has been gutted. Market research departments spend a lot of time figuring out how to sell better to customers. Their business customers are compensated on “selling more stuff” so they need “actionable research.” This is all great, but something has been lost in the shuffle.
Here’s a first attempt at a definition for inbound marketing:

Inbound Marketing: The voice of the customer manifested inside the company.

• A good start, but not very descriptive. The voice of the customer, manifested inside the company, could be one person aggregating a bunch of customer feedback speaking to no one in particular.

Inbound Marketing: The voice of the customer manifested inside the company, that acts as an empowered advocate for customer needs across all company functions.

• This is much better, because now the voice of the customer is actually changing the way the business operates. But something is still missing, which is how this customer advocacy is gathered and communicated.

Inbound Marketing: The voice of the customer manifested inside the company, that acts as an empowered advocate for customer needs across all company functions, gathered through the ever-increasing digital interactions and channels available.

• This definition brings together the what, the why and the how, and seems pretty comprehensive and precise. A lot more work needs to be done to flesh this definition out, which will be the subject of future posts on this topic.

When talking about allocating a marketing budget, one of the most important questions is the split between corporate and brand spending. In other words, is it better to lift the brand as a whole, or hawk specific products? Peeling the onion another layer, when doing corporate advertising, should a company focus on "hard" attributes--also called "corporate ability" or CA advertising--or on softer "corporate social responsibility" or CSR?

I hadn't really thought about this much in the context of tech until today, when I started running through various ad campaigns and realizing just how bereft most are of CSR advertising in tech. Literally the only company I can come up with that does CSR is Microsoft. Am I missing someone? I guess you could argue that Google does it, but that's not really advertising as much as big PR stunts.

I think the reason for this is simple: most tech companies don't really do anything "bad", or at least they're not accused of it. Have any tech companies recently changed the climate? Cut down a rainforest? Enslaved children to mine silicon? If they have, it doesn't make the news because they're so far down the value chain from these activities. And of course, this is why Microsoft has to run ad campaigns on its CSR.




Keep in mind, the above table contains estimates I put together in five minutes. They are 100% wrong.

This leads me to wonder, does CSR even work to a technology environment? Does it almost backfire? I mean, I watch these Exxon Mobil / BP greenwashing ads and I literally want to vomit. Maybe Microsoft would be better off ignoring CSR because the audience is so savvy. I think there's probably a big inverse correlation between CSR effective and audience sophistication.

What about product vs. corporate spending? Apple doesn't do any corporate spending. They market their products only, and yet have an incredibly strong brand. This is because their products are (1) linked together through design, creating an "idea" of an Apple brand just by handling, viewing and using their products, and (2) are advertised in very similar ways. So, they're getting the double-whammy of getting product SKUs out the door with product advertising and strengthening their brand.

Could any company do this? Could Microsoft do this? Are they better off just abandoning CSR and CA altogether and advertising products through a unified portfolio approach? I think it's worth a shot.