The Marketing “Nugget” of Business Strategy

John McKay thinks that and marketing people and advertising agencies blew it in the 1980s.

John’s the senior account director at Introworks, a Minnetonka marketing company whose work is divided about evenly between the medical, high-tech, and financial-services sectors.

So how did marketers shank it? John’s take: In the ’80s, marketers began to get relegated to business’s children’s table. They created funny commercials and glittering messages and won creativity awards—but the C-suiters treated them more and more as giddy kids. Instead, top management called in big-time consulting firms like McKinsey and Anderson, who gave them expensive advice with the air of profound grown-up seriousness. They wrote serious reports with serious-looking charts. Meanwhile, the marketers focused on “hey, dude, that’s cool!”

“Marketers should be at the table,” John believes. They know (or should know) the customers. They know (or should know) what moves them. They should do cool work, yes (and Introworks does do cool design,). But not cool for cool’s sake. Their efforts, if done right, can be the difference between a successful campaign and something more along these lines.

And particularly for med-tech firms introducing a new product, customer information (data-driven and intuitive) can determine whether it gets attention in the emotionally and physically intense marketplace of hospitals, clinics, and patients—or disappears in the back of a hospital’s closet shelf, no matter how elegant the design or how attractive the marketing materials. Introworks says it’s been involved in 50-plus successful medical device launches—the 12-person shop knows whereof it speaks.

One of its newer clients is Kansas-based KCBioMedix, which is introducing a device designed to help preemies better “learn” the swallowing and sucking capabilities they need to move to oral feeding.

The standard approach to this is to have neonatal ICU (NICU) nurses do physical-therapy types of activities like sticking their fingers in the baby’s mouth to encourage sucking. It’s something many nurses (in a sense) like to do, and why not? You’re helping save a baby’s life, and in a very intimate way.

Not to say that the following is true about KCBioMedix, but the thing about smaller med-tech firms is that they’re typically founded by brilliant engineers who tend to think logically: If I build a device that saves providers money and offers patients a better treatment than what’s currently on the market, of course hospitals and doctors will want it. So all we need to do is get an appointment with the CFO, show him or her the clinical studies, and ring up the sale.

Makes sense. But as Introworks knows from experience, that’s not often not what happens. As company president and cofounder Bob Freytag puts it, “the question is, what’s the issue, not the product.”

In the case of KCBioMedix, the issue is, would the nurses and NICU physicians want what it’s selling? They already have techniques in place—why use an expensive new device? Especially if they’re proud of the techniques they now use? With a new device, if you don’t have buy-in from medical staff, the CFO isn’t likely to buy.

With a new product, John observes, you have to appeal to emotion, too. Informed emotion, if you will. In the case of the NICU nurses, you’d need to approach them directly and appeal to the fact that this will not only save babies’ lives, but also get them more quickly where they belong: in the arms of their mothers.

Bob calls this type of customer knowledge the “nugget”—the deep-down market understanding a company needs to position its product for launch. And to his mind, marketing people need to be in on the product discussion early—to ensure that strategy, company staff, product naming, marketing materials, and market knowledge are in alignment.

As John McKay notes, “What we do is more business consultation, not “let’s make something cool.’ ” Improving a company’s business practices, both internally and externally, can be cool enough.

BTW: Magnet 360, a Minneapolis-based network of marketing-related agencies, has launched a competition for $100,000 in free services to companies looking to improve their online marketing. Companies selected for the Challenge (application info here) will have new landing pages built by the designers and marketing mavens of Magnet 360. According to Magnet 360’s Scott Litman, the inspiration for the Challenge was discussions with marketers frustrated that their companies’ Web sites and related media were not sufficiently translating visitors into sales leads. I’m guessing what this initiative is addressing is that more and more companies are realizing that the Web site is becoming the hub of their sales efforts—but are still learning how to take advantage of that fact.

Comments

[twitter.com/ahawkinson]

Interesting sentiment and comments around marketers being relegated to the "children's table" in the 80's. Marketing is dramatically shifting again today, and I wonder how many existing marketers will survive the transition to the new set of skills that are required to be successful.

Consumers trust each other far more than traditional advertising, and the growth of social networking has made it certain that an ample supply of peer opinions and customer reviews is always available - http://bit.ly/4zJ0Xe.

That leads to a monumental shift whereby marketing BEGINS with customer service and engagement - http://bit.ly/1XvnHY - and many of the forms of traditional advertising completely break down.

If marketers partner with the customer service teams of their organizations and take this attitude, I guarantee you that they will no longer be at the children's table and will have an opportunity to have a powerful influence.