Beyond Marketing: Pinko-izing the Entire Organization
John Ounpuu
to customers, who typically see companies as single entities. It stands
to reason, then, that the Pinko marketing approach will work best if
the underlying philosophy is embraced by the organization as a
whole-specifically all customer-facing employees, managers and
departments.
But how do you make this happen?
I can think of two options:
1) The Pinko marketer informally evangelizes Pinko principles to the
entire organization so that the vision is embraced across all
departments.
2) The Pinko marketer ceases to be a marketer and formally evolves into
a sort of Community Ambassador that floats between every department to
ensure that the entire company stays connected to the community.
Thoughts?
Brad Hintze
What I have found is that as the other departments and employees become aware of what you are doing they will be naturally interested and start participating with you.
Just today I was talking with one of our developers about some of the things we are doing and he was so intrigued and excited by it. It didn't take much and now he is on board with our approach and will participate in any way that he can.
Passionate employees are going to see the result of your efforts and jump all over it. Making your results and progress known is a great way to get everyone on board.
Brad
Tara Hunt
It's harder than it looks, though. I'd love for us to be able to work together (all of us Pinkos) on the 'secrets' of selling this into a company. There are a good deal of old skool types and 'designer CEOs' who will come over and say:
"Let's make this more viral"
Etc. (believe me, my most recent post came from a personal point of pain)
And no matter what you say, they want to push rather than let things flow. The more you (I) push back, the more they will try to control it.
So...where do we go?
Tara
Colin
processes that work against customer centricity. I personally like the
evangalism idea, because it feeds on like minded people within the
organisation that get it, and understand the current operating
processes are not effective.
Channels to us, means internet, telephone, branch etc.
________________________________
I wrote this just today in an internal blog - slightly changed to
protect the innocent.
A much overused concept is customer experience and who "owns" it.
Typically the responses fall between the extremes of "ME", or
no-one, we all do.
That debate aside, I would observe that many groups and people have a
real and informed interest in the optimal customer experience. A few
projects recently got me wondering about the components of customer
experience:
1. bank interaction - customer bank touchpoint
2. product purchases and sales
3. product features and benefits
4. problem resolution
5. charges and interest rates
6. ABM availability
7. branch design
8.advertising (or lack of advertising)
9. employee personality and friendliness
That's enough to get us started. When I read this post from Ron
Shevlin (ex Forrester) it highlights that customers perceptions and
especially positive ones are personal and involving interaction. They
are immediate, and fit into that co-incidence of need and resolution,
at the customer access point with the company.
Items 1, 4, and 9 are the only ones that fit into that immediacy of
impact statement. These are all impacted by the customer access point.
And we know that over 80% of customer interactions are handled by self
service today. Yet today most customer strategies are developed in the
product area, or marketing.
So who has the most impact on customer understanding, and can best
influence things for the customers best interest. It has to be
channels ... for those of us who work in channels, I think we have to
evangelise customers, using customer knowledge and understanding. We
all have to become Robert Scoble.
Shevlin link:
http://marketingwhims.blogspot.com/2006/04/stories-that-loyal-customers-tell.html
Jason Baptiste
joined. I'm CEO of a new startup that's launching in a couple of
weeks in the online information and media space. I've started to get
into Pinko recently, since it reflects a lot of my views and how
we'll be operating as a company. I think we're in an interesting
age, where the customers and the people are really taking back the
web, products themselves, and the media. As far as pinko-izing the
entire organization, here's some of my thoughts:
a) Start planting seeds in other divisions of the company. Ie- Talk
with your friends/ close co-workers in the development end. Let each
department have their own pinko marketing evangelist
b) Don't be pushy/ make it relative. Nobody, even your friends like
to have things pushed upon them. If you make it relative to what
they're doing, or what you know appeals to them, they can relate, and
see the reasons pinko marketing might just work.
c) Lose the big picture. If you're a large organization, forget that
you have 6,000 or even 60,000 employees. Look to the smaller groups.
In Microsoft's case, try to start talking with the development team
of 50 people working on a new product. If you're a small startup,
like many of us, I think it begins with picking talent. Not to say,
that the decision on a team member should be based ultimately upon
whether they would be into pink marketing or not.
Colin, I agree, we all need to have a little Scoble in us. I'm
working on a blog post, on our test site entitled- Scoble For CEO:
How Microsoft Can Save Themselves.
some pinko marketing ideas/community development ideas i've been
throwing around:
a) Town Hall Meetings. Open forum discussions, styled like aol back
in the day where there would be rows and questions submitted. all
taking place online, and can scale to hold a lot of users.
b) Letting users pick the new features. Having a poll where users
start to pick new features
c) Hire passionate, but also qualified users of your product
d) Community Advisement Board- an official advising board for the
product consisted of 7 core users.
e) hold actual offline town meetings and meetups, where users get to
spend time with the real players of the company.
I look forward to more emails, and participating in this group.
Sincerely,
Jason L. Baptiste
CEO of Viral Ventures, parent company of uGather.com
Tara Hunt
I love seeing so many entrepreneurs contributing here. These should be added to the wiki under:
" How to talk to your boss" - this is the area I have the greatest problem...and all of these suggestions are super helpful.
Tara
Jason Baptiste
prashant
centric so implementing pinko overthere might not be a good idea . but
i strongly believe that pinko need to move beyond just being a
marketing tool . we need to integrate product develpoment with pinko .
in tradiitonal organizations Marketing is a post proccessing step ,
they develop some thing and during the hatching period they are out
of sync with the requiremnt of customer and the result is absurd
product like "Coke Vanilla ". its a real stupidity of the product
team to come up with a concept like that and a torture for marketing
team to sell soemthing which nobody want . thats evil
now if pinko permeates the organizatioanl silos and goes to product
development phase also it will be a welcome change .
Patrick Dodd
Colin
p's (price, place product and promotion)"
I think the Pinko job description says it well: "Shifting your
advertising budget to improve your product".
Translated that means reversing the trend of product development first,
and customer/marketing second. Establish what's needed by customers,
and iteratively build and improve it. But that's complicated for
existing companies, I think evangalism might be the only way to make
the change begin, then, as the organisation matures, everyone will work
that way.
The part thats still not clear - do you need a marketing department, or
is everyone in the process a marketer operating under the new rules?
Tara Hunt
That question is a scary one. ;)
Well, I don't think you need a marketing department full of people who want to write big, fat strategies and panick alongside the CEO on stuff "we need to become more viral".
I think we need a designated person whose job it is to be the community spokesperson.
This is less necessary when the entire company 'gets it', but is still good to have. Ideally, your CEO, engineers, product managers, board of directors, advisors, administrative staff and accountants are all part of the community you are serving and are always in touch. Because this isn't always the case, the new marketing person is in the role of a. being part of the community they serve, b. trying to get the rest of the team to do the same, and c. when b. fails, the one who advocates for the community.
My hope is that someday, enough people will get it that we'll all be out of a job. ;)
T
Colin
directors,
advisors, administrative staff and accountants are all part of the
community
you are serving and are always in touch"
I have seen this situation work in a large company (Bank) and its
incredibly powerful. The keys were simple products, and unquestioning
belief in the customer.That equation was something that all staff
bought into, so it didn't matter who spoke with which customer, the
message was always the same ... we are here to exceed your every
expectation, and it worked.
And in that company, as part of the marketing dept, we didn't do
"marketing" - we were focussed on product development.
Results were customer loyalty scores that were off the scale.
Tara Hunt
Tara
--
tara 'miss rogue' hunt
www.horsepigcow.com
Patrick Dodd
"Translated that means reversing the trend of product development first,
Cheers,
Patrick Dodd
sundar subramanian
I have been a lurker in this group long enough and could't resist posting today.
I am part of a small startup (started recently) where everybody gets the pinko marketing ideas. just that we dont call it that.
as patrick was saying, we practice Agile methodology with daily immersive interactions with open source groups spread across the world. these groups are both contributors as well as potential customers of ours and it is gratifing to see the seamless interactions and exchanges we have. these kinds of free and frank exchanges of ideas give rise to new ways of working together and helping each other whcih would not have een possible in the old world silo-type thinking.
for us pink marketing is no longer a buzzword but a fact which has been internalized.
maybe i should write about this in more details sometime.
regards,
~sundar
Deborah Schultz
Tara Hunt
This is getting really exciting. I'm so glad to see such a variety of backgrounds and experiences popping up on the Pinko list. Like Deb said, call it what you will...but it really is bringing like minds together. The best things I've heard over the past couple of weeks:
"I'm a Pinko Product Manager"
"That would make me a Pinko PR gal"
"I'm definitely a Pinko when it comes to user experience design"
"Are there Pinko engineers? I'd like to say I'm one."
It's not just about marketing...
T