Musings of a Marketing Maven

Confession: after so many years of composing on a keyboard, I can no longer write or take notes quickly using a pen. Plus, my memory for details isn’t what it used to be.

My job requires me to interview key stakeholders or subject matter experts on topics that are important to my client, but often unfamiliar to me before we launch into the conversation. Which makes relying on memory even more difficult when I lack the right mental model “to connect” and organize new concepts, jargon or names heard during an interview.

The reason I’m doing the interviews in the first place has some high-stakes objective for my client, so it’s important that both my listening and recall be nuanced and accurate.

So the question is, what’s a smart coping strategy when your consulting practice requires you to interview lots of people, “remember” the details of what they say, while remaining present in a conversational but guiding style? And then synthesize later from the compilation of conversations, while offering fresh insights from an objective but informed big-picture perspective?

[Read more →]

Entrepreneurs and new product champions are always looking for the secret to market success. A popular formula is to hire “serial entrepreneurs” who’ve been successful before, assuming that success is transferable from one company to another.

This can be risky. As one 8-time entrepreneur writes,

Since time immemorial a post mortem of a failed company usually includes, “I don’t understand what happened. We did everything that worked in our last startup.” The failure is not due to lack of energy, effort or passion. [Steven Gary Blank, founder of E.piphany]

[Read more →]

The problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it so easy to bore your audience to death. (Been there, done that…)

We all know the seductive ease of creating a new presentation: setting up a dozen slides with titles, and then filling in the slides with endless bullet points.

It’s Too Easy to be Boring

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to remember the details of your message: if you can see the screen, you just read what’s on your slides. This practice is all-too common when the people who create and those who present the slide decks are different.

But it’s deadly for your audience when you add nothing fresh beyond what appears on the slides.

According to presentation gurus, this is absolutely the wrong approach for designing and delivering slide decks. Wrong, that is, if you care about getting your point across — and being remembered for what you say or believe.

I can just hear my husband’s rebuttal: in today’s hyper-busy business world, there’s no alternative to decks full of bullet-point slides. What else, after all, can you do when creating a presentation due later today while watching yet another yaddah-yaddah webinar or attending an all-hands audio conference?

My counter-argument: if presentations were more clear and memorable for people in the audience, perhaps we wouldn’t waste our time in so many unproductive meetings or webinars.

What People Do Better Than Machines

As presentation guru Garr Reynolds writes in Presentation Zen, 

Remember that we are living in a time when fundamental human talents are in great demand. Anyone — indeed any machine — can read a list of features or give a stream of facts to an audience. That’s not what we need or want. What we yearn for is to listen to an intelligent and evocative — perhaps at times even provocative — human being who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stimulates us with knowledge plus meaning, context, and emotion in a way that is memorable.

Although this point is often forgotten (especially in high-tech product marketing circles), Garr Reynolds reminds us that:

Presentations are not just about following a formula for transferring facts in your head [or the product manager's head -- ed. note] to the heads of those sitting before you by reciting a list of points on a slide. (If it were, why not send an email and cancel the presentation?) What people want is fundamentally more human. They want to hear “the story” of your facts.

In Presentation Zen Reynolds offers numerous examples of visually stunning and memorable slides, clearly designed by people with a visual eye and a knack for storytelling. He also lays out a set of principles for designing slides when you aspire to similar zen-like simplicity and memorability.

If you follow Reynolds’ principles (and license stock imagery from Getty, Corbis or iStockphoto.com), you too can produce more memorable slide decks.

This assumes you have a clear story to tell, have clarified what you want to say, and understand how best to get your points across to your audience.

Back in the Real World…

People who market high-tech products are among the least likely to practice the principles of “presentation zen.” Think about all those product managers — people who are paid to agonize over and fight for all the gory details of their products. After all their effort getting the product ready for the market, they want you to appreciate all those details too. Point by point, slide by slide. Stack diagram after stack diagram.

Sixty-seven slides later, what do you remember of the presentation? Can you remember anything the next day?

The Best of Both

If you lack designerly skills to create visually stunning presentations, what’s the alternative (besides hiring a designer)?

I’ve blogged about the power of visual thinking, and have recommended a book by Dan Roam, Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This is a great resource for business people (and teachers).

This book can help you learn how to think through and then convey complex situations through the power of simple visuals. Throughout his book Dan Roam uses simple, cartoon-like sketches to illustrate his points (as he does here on his company’s web site).

I think the approach that Dan Roam teaches offers wonderful possibilities for helping you crystallize your thinking and share your ideas — and how you got there — with others in very powerful ways. But some people might find his visual style too casual…

For situations that require more formality or visual elegance, the best of both approaches is to:

• apply Roam’s framework for thinking through the challenges and your communications options, and
• design the presentation (and your voice-over commentary) with the help of the principles outlined in Presentation Zen.

In a nutshell Presentation Zen explains that what makes messages memorable is some combination of:

• simplicity
• unexpectedness
• concreteness
• credibility
• emotions
• stories

I wish I had learned these principles back in school — or at least, much earlier in my career!

For Your Bookshelves

At some point in most consulting engagements, someone will ask, “Is everyone else as screwed up as we are?” The answer, of course, is yes. Most consultants’ business opportunities are created by their clients’ inability to solve (or communicate) vexing problems or challenges.

And now there’s a deceptively simple business book that can help you become less dependent upon consultants’ help, if you learn how to apply visual thinking to problem solving and group communications.

This book is written especially for people like me and you who think they can’t draw. It focuses on helping you see differently, explore and think things through visually, and then convey the insights you develop by this visual thinking technique.

In its own way, this is a practical guide for people who want to “Think Different.”

Simply Powerful

Besides its charming stick-figure sketches, the secret to The Back of the Napkin is its simple but powerful framework and the explanations on how to apply this framework to real-world problems:

• “seeing” problems in terms of the classic 6 W’s: who, what, when, where, how and why;
• exploring what’s most important to understand and then convey — for you as problem solvers, and for your audience (or the people you’re trying to convince) — via 5 key dimensions the author calls “SQVID”;
• discovering insights or fresh alternatives through the patterns that emerge from your visual combinations;
• and then applying the best communications approach given the audience and your objectives.

As evidence for the power of his framework, the book’s author, Dan Roam, cites scientific research that reveals the brain is “hard-wired” for fast processing in response to the 6 W’s, when information is conveyed visually.

As an antidote to “death by PowerPoint,” I highly recommend The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam.

[Read more →]

Today I was struck with how many people are writing and debating about the secrets to successful marketing. Seth Godin has a new book out; the CMO Council has released a major report on B2B marketing; and I stumbled across a blog that challenges the validity of the classic marketing funnel. Pure brain candy.

[Read more →]

As 2008 nears, I’m resolved to make room for a more balanced life, less cluttered with frenzy and meaningless busyness. Yoga helps, but it’s time to invest in some mental and lifestyle “housekeeping” as well. As a first step toward de-cluttering, I’ve decided to consult some expert coaches.

[Read more →]

Wenger, manufacturer of the venerable Swiss Army knife, now sells a 3-pound multifunction “knife” with 87 tools and over 100 uses. No doubt intended for price-insensitive gadget collectors, it carries a hefty price tag of $1200. It reminds me of the current generation of smart phones.

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago a colleague recommended I try Adobe’s new web conferencing service, Adobe Acrobat Connect. The pricing and value proposition looked pretty interesting for a consulting business like mine, so I thought I’d give it a try.

[Read more →]

Mobile Insider’s Steve Smith confessed today to his “Google seduction” — a whole new level of experience that Google delivers to iPhone users via Google’s mobile-optimized services.

First off, Google for iPhone excels at speed and efficiency, and the app shows how much this matters in pulling a user in.

[Read more →]

Doing a major refresh to a website can be a daunting task, no matter what size your business is. For huge corporations the challenge is coordinating messaging strategies and negotiating priority conflicts across internal fiefdoms.

For a small business like mine, without a permanent in-house web team, finding the time (and the talent) to overhaul the website is its own challenge. But we finally went live today: check out www.informing-arts.com.

[Read more →]