Trying to appear as someone that you are not will always fail in B2B marketing. You will irritate rather than communicate if your marketing messages don’t reflect what you really are. To spend 300 million USD as Microsoft does it right now with ad campaigns won’t change that at all, in contrary, it is a total waste. As Seth Godin sums it up:“Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money.”

I am sure you already had similar experiences as I had this week. You are so busy with work and life that you miss great things and are very surprised that you have not heard of it before. I had exactly this experience myself with a great singer: Sophie Zelmani from Sweden. I suppose most of you have heard of her before as she is quite high ranked in the charts. I must admit I’ve never heard of her before though. When I skimmed through my iPhone iTunes store this week, (thanks to Apple) I found her name and listened to one of her songs. I was immediately taken away by her voice and the mood she spreads. After listening to lots of her songs now and - that is what you need to do with Sophie’s songs - dived into her mood, I asked myself why do I like her? The answer is: she comes across as being very authentic. You simply get the feeling she thinks what she sings. No makeup BS, plain singing from the heart. Now why am I writing about this here you might have started wondering? Authenticity is key for all of us product marketing folks. If your clients get the feeling you are at the heart of things and can offer them real value without too much sales and marketing blablabla then you are nearly where you want to be: win a new fan. I became a fan of Sophie. My favorite songs and videos are: Going home, Always You, Memory Loves You. The fall and winter can come, thanks to Sophie!

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=31827908

The NYT has a fascinating digital graphic out that visualizes the world by total and per capita spending.

The above shows total spending on electronics. In case you did not know it, the UK is not all of Europe. Switzerland spends the same (in total) as South Africa. Japan is the biggest spender in Asia, which is not totally new, of course, but might still surprise some people. Of course this chart could now be expanded indefinitely. Could e.g. show relative growth or decline in spending. Could also be more fine-grained and show e.g. IT spending and sub-categories of IT. But for now we aren’t complaining, and say it is a nice job. Except - - some of the country locations are really far from reality. The graphic designer must have missed too many geography classes.

I have to warn everybody from some annoying experience I made. While I am overall quite impressed with the product as you can read below, sales as well as support response times are horrible. It takes days if not even weeks to get anyone to return e-mails. Then you need to also be aware that the product costs between 6-8k USD per year so is not to be compared with salesforce.com like pricing. Lastly, I am still waiting that they confirm to me that all my uploaded data from a trial is indeed deleted and not used by anyone. I have already asked twice in the last three days but still did not get any response. They also cut you off the trial without any warning so that you won’t be able to take such actions yourself.

One year ago I already trialed Genius.com organizing initial e-mailings to prospective clients. At first I was excited - as far as I remember - but then I decided to drop it anyway due to a lot of missing features and also lack of stability.
Now I am impressed with it and Genius.com got much closer to deserving its name.
As with many good software tools usability makes the difference. Exactly this is what the Silicon Valley based VC funded startup does extremely well now and most importantly very reliably and stable. Investment into the platform and into the Ajax client user interface have paid off.

They also addressed the spam filter issue now very well. No cookies are used. Genius.com solves this problem, at least for now, by giving your websites a unique new URL which is all that is needed to identify who, for how long and in what order clicked onto your websites. You can even replay what someone did on your website showing its path and time spent on each page, so you can draw real conclusions that help decide what to do next with each prospect.
Equally well done is the management of emails and contacts organized in SmartGroups. Here a lot of goodies have been added compared with a year ago.

One nice feature is the possibility to add a remove footer when you send out the e-mail to more than 20 recipients. This complies with US anti-spam regulations and is also in Europe good to have.

Overall Genius.com is a very good tool that solves a current problem very nicely. I will have to test the integration with salesforce.com still but also here it appears the company’s product management is eager to provide a complete user experience. With regards to it’s business model one can expect that they position themself for a trade sale to one of the BIG players such as Microsoft, salesforce.com or maybe Google. I can so far fully recommend Genius.com to create, execute, analyze and coordinate your business e-mailings and have it all integrated with other website analytics or CRM tools.

This week I heard on the radio while traveling to Germany that the small (revenue 40 million EUR) German high-end teddy bear company Steiff decided to move production back to Germany from China. Reasons mentioned were long transportation (up to 3 months), initial startup costs, among others. This news had its impact as many media picked up the story and helped Steiff’s CEO Mr. Frechen with this PR campaign. Steiff needs this PR desperately as they have to fight low cost competition and it is key to them to develop a strong brand similar to the fashion labels.

I must admit that I also fell into this PR trap and started thinking if this could be a general trend now or what impact this would have. This morning I did a little research on Steiff’s CEO and found that he told back in January already in public, see FAZ, that he would bring production back to Germany from China. At that time it did not have the PR effect he was hoping for, so now they brought it up again (I assume they have hired a PR agency to do so) and recooked this old story again.

While I can see lots of resentment in countries like Germany where jobs are lost and new ones created in China, it is also clear that the future cannot be in competing with low cost manufacturing locations but in innovation and excellent product marketing. This is true for consumer as well as for ICT industries. Thinking differently would be fatal and also Steiff is BTW manufacturing in Northern Africa where total costs (transportation included) are similar now to China I think. Lastly what Mr. Frechen will also learn over time is the fact that building a solid brand takes time and cannot be done with fake PR news. People today want authenticity, good content, interaction and not propaganda. See our new PR Services website on this topic…

Take a look at this on-stage holographic video conference PR show run by Cisco’s CEO John Chambers. They have100 systems installed at Cisco , he says, and this on-stage PR show makes you even think Cisco would be the mastermind behind this technology. But the credit for it goes to the UK company Musion Systems LTD. Musion holds the intellectual property for holographic video and licenses it through a comprehensive list of resellers across the world. What Cisco did is not unique, though. as there are plenty of other large companies doing the same “trick” as you can see in the Musion portfolio website too. Virgin’s Richard Branson is of course the ideal person to do such a virtual show, being “beamed in” from his Caribbean island to a London digital megastore opening event. To top things, you can also let people come back to “life” again and have them appear in a live concert. Done so in Japan: “The untimely death of charismatic guitarist Hide in 1998 not only put any such plans on hold but sent Japan’s leading rock band into hiatus for ten years. Hide was “brought back to life” at Tokyo Dome in March 2008 using Musion Eyeliner Holographic Projection System.”

Redherring, the US tech startup magazine (with European location in Zurich) announced the winners of its Redherring Europe award. Awards are an excellent way to market yourself, both for the startups nominated and even more so for the ones who are among the winners and of course for Redherring itself. The magazine also makes a lot of money inviting startups and venture capitalists and a few service providers to this yearly event; this year they gathered in the European hotspot Malta. Attendance is not cheap. Companies pay 2350 EUR per person (1800 EUR for secondaries) and are then allowed to attend a few days of panel discussions and meet the startups, VCs and a few service providers.

Now all good in theory - watching the Mediterranean Sea over a nice candlelight dinner, listening to the waves and feeling the nice warm breeze (we have not attended this event so this here is pure fiction) - but what do things look like in the morning with a little headache from the red wine the night before?

First of all, every single Redherring 100 winner will display prominently on their home page the Redherring winner logo. Nearly all of them will write a press release saying how proud they are to be a Redherring Winner. And surely they can be proud since they made it to the top 100 startups in Europe, where such celebrities like Skype, eBay and also Google once were winners (the last two in the US of course). So it is a nice PR event for everyone and of course in particular for Redherring (nothing wrong about that, everyone needs to market themselves and that is totally legitimate). Now comes my point. What would someone like me or, as I am already convinced, a potential client (let’s assume the startup is aiming to sell to large clients, not all do but most of them) think about seeing a Redherring 100 logo on their website?

• there is not much relevant news that they can talk about so they pay to go to an event where they get an award with 99 others
• not having much to tell is a clear sign of an early stage startup with little company and product history
• startups are a high risk to buy from for established companies since if things don’t work out people expose themself to internal critique, (buying big blue IBM is always safe)

So in short, instead of trying to hide their immaturity and appear a safe place to buy from, all of them even pronounce their lack of history and tell everyone about it. A startup should try to spend all their efforts and money to win good reference clients. Potentially even “buy” them by offering things for very cheap or low cost so that they can overcome the above mentioned hesitation and can win other key accounts who then pay the normal price. A BIG PR splash then is what should be done. In general we like Redherring as they are one of the very few survivors in the VC, startup magazine scene (their European counterpart, Tornado Insider, had to shut down long time ago) but that does not mean we think everything they do is cool. One purpose of the Redherring event is of course that VCs and startups can meet at one place, get to know each other and then possibly find each other. That is a highly worthwhile thing and could be achieved even without an award. Redherring would disagree I am sure…

The list of VCs and service providers who attended:

360 Partners, Accel Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Ariadne Capital, ArmaPartners LLP, Astutia Ventures GmbH, Atomico, Atlas Ventures, Balderton Partners, BayTech Venture Capital Beratungs, BDMI - Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Big Bang Ventures, Bluerun Ventures, BrainsToVentures AG, Cartagena Capital GmbH, Highland Capital Partners, HOWZAT Media, ePlanet Ventures, Esprit Capital Partners, ETV Capital, Forsyth Group, Euro Business Center, Gemini Israel Funds, Georgetown Venture Partners LLP (GVP), GIMV, Google, GP Bullhound, Grazia Equity GmbH, HassoPlattnerVentures, HOWZAT Media, IBM Software Group, IBM Venture Capital Group, Index Ventures, Industry Ventures, Intel Capital, Internet Capital Group, Kreos Capital, Logitech Europe S.A., LUNDXY, MCI Management, Mooreland Partners LLC, Morten Lund ADS, Mountain Cleantech, Nauta Capital, Neuhaus Partners, Nordic Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Oracle EMEA, Partech International, Provider Venture Partners, Redalpine Partners ag, Regent Associates, SAP Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, SEB Ventures, Sevenload GmbH, SmartCity, Smac Partners, Sony Europe Venturing, Stellant Partners, SVB Global, TFV Ventures, Truffle Venture, UBS Investment Bank, and Valkiria Network.

The Shell Eco-marathon Europe 2008 competition has been started in France. Goal is to run as far as possible with just one liter of gasoline. This year with gasoline prices three times higher than just a few years back this event will draw even more attention. That Shell is sponsoring it is a clever marketing coup it seems as they of course have profited from the rising prices the most. The vehicle designs are optimized to reach just this one goal within a set of regulations such as min. average speed of 30km/h, which makes sense, as otherwise with solar panels one might be able to run forever. Last year’s winner made it 2791km on one liter of fuel. Once again this year you will find fuel cell technologies - plus, of course, totally stripped down vehicle designs that are highly aerodynamic. The drivers are girls as they are lighter, better fit into the vehicles and probably are better at enduring the physical stress of being squeezed in for that long. The teams have lots of fun, it seems, which is great. Maybe one addition should also be to build vehicles that could be used in daily life by adding certain constraints, so that one day maybe Shell might have to rethink sponsoring as it has real impact on fuel savings. Right now it is a nice marketing event.

What have Australia and Switzerland in common in this year’s IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook which displays the relative economic competitiveness between 55 countries? Both improved their relative positions by about the same (Australia from rank 12 to 7 and Switzerland from rank 6 to 4). How much practical value this Yearbook has I don’t know but I am sure that politicians in each country will be able to use it accordingly. Overall I think it is foremost a great PR campaign to self-promote the business school. What suprised me a bit is the lead the US still has. That both Singapore and Hong Kong are in the top makes a lot of sense though. Now with regards to Switzerland one can feel good living in such a high-ranking country and the number one in Europe. Some of the reasons IMD mentions are:

• the world’s 3rd largest current account surplus (16.8% of the GDP) and an increase in inward direct investment flows
• labor relations are generally productive (2nd)
• workers are highly motivated (2nd)
• investment incentives are considered to be attractive to foreign investors (3rd)
• attractiveness of the fiscal policy continues (2nd)
• the Swiss are conscious of being able to benefit from an excellent quality of life (1st)
• languages skills are meeting the needs of enterprises (1st)
• knowledge transfer between companies and universities obtains the 3rd rank
• availability of skilled and specialized labor, having competencies in finance and international experience

Now on the downside for Switzerland are (not surprisingly either): “entrepreneurship is not particularly widespread (27th compared to 6th last year); ageing of society - a possible obstacle to economic development – is becoming a concern (18th); weak representation of women in leading government and business positions (47th); a high cost of living (50th)”

The entrepreneur part I consider as a challenge where also lots of government money invested in the past has not brought any bottom line results so far. The ageing society should not be such a huge problem for an attractive country like Switzerland, though. The increased costs is relative, I think, as outside of the big cities (just a few km away) costs come down substantially and I even see it as a plus since investments in real estate are a very safe bet unlike in the US.