If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know I like music and music metaphors. If you’re an irregular reader may I suggest a sparkling glass of Sal Hepatica.
I have many favorite album titles, including Anywhere You Are, There You Is, which I wrote about in a column that can be accessed by engaging the down arrow like so. One of my favorite titles is from the guitarist Don Dixon, whom I should like far more than I do.
Dixon’s record starts with the artist as a very young man of about 10, arguing with his brother over music. At one point his brother accuses Dixon of being a ham, to which Dixon replies, “Yeah? Well, if I’m a ham, you’re a sausage.” And that’s the title of the album.
Believe it or not, there is application for this in the wacky world of marketing, with just a few minor changes to selected words. Instead of, “If I’m a ham, you’re a sausage,” may I suggest, “If I’m in sales, you’re in product development.”
It’s a fact. Of the two broad duties performed by many marketers, sales continually stresses to marketers that they’re in sales, while no one stresses anything to sales because sales can’t be found. Or they’re at Panera Bread for the eighth time this week. Or they’re out of range.
Okay, consider this a shot across sales’ well-dressed bow: You’re in product development. Everyone in this man’s corporate army is in product development.
The trick is engaging sales and the other non-lunching members of your organization in product development without actually having them design a product.
You want sales actually designing your product less than you want cholera. The Microsoft Kin is a perfect example of sales designing a product. It accumulated more bells than St. Mary’s and more whistles than a Brazilian thong and sold for a lot more than it should have at the start and less than it did but still too much after Microsoft had a product launch and nobody came.
You could tell this product was a technological kamikaze. No kid will buy a cell phone for kids. Kids buy adult cell phones and find new and amazing things to do with them, like use them as remote controllers for cage-fighters while simultaneously listening to the Kings of Leon and broadcasting, “I have arrived at Dairy Queen!” to the world.
Along those same lines, you do not want programmers designing a product, nor do you want call-center employees or the building-and-grounds staff.
The result would resemble the KFC Double Down sandwich, with a third piece of chicken added for the programmer in the Star Trek shirt.
So everyone’s in product development but you don’t want anyone actually developing product, huh? How do you talk your way out of this one?
It’s a simple two-stage process. First, find all the smart people. Second, give all these departments pieces without ceding control of the whole.
I know this is an amazing revelation, but not all the smart people in your organization are in marketing. Similarly amazing, not all the halfwits are in sales.
Smart people are smart people, regardless of their position. They’re like the nondescript Minneapolis musicians who backed up Bob Dylan on Blood on the Tracks. Just because they’re not famous big-shots doesn’t mean they’re not any good.
One of the most important internal tasks you can perform as a marketer is to use your “smart radar” and find the smart people in every department. Once you’ve done that you can use them to mobilize areas under their control and engage them appropriately in the product-development process.
Take R&D. They came up with the core idea, the basic improvement or innovation that is going to make this product sing two choruses of “California Girls” (the Katy Perry version). However, you don’t want R&D going any further than the idea stage, at least not without changing out of that shirt. You don’t give them veto power over packaging, for instance, unless you like your toaster oven wrapped in a schematic. Yet there are people in R&D who think beyond the D, who can grasp the marketing implications of what they do. Use them to communicate back to their teams ways of making what they do more marketing-friendly. I guarantee that the next time through the process will be better geared toward a marketable outcome.
Programmers and Web designers are a perfect match with call-center employees. Why? The call-center employees are most closely attuned to what’s happening on the ground; the programmer knows what can be done with the air. Left to their own devices they aren’t much; the call-center folks will refer callers to the Web for guidance, even though the Web site has been given over (by the programmers) to YouTube videos of kittens running for public office, while the Facebook page runs a guess-the-celebrity-earlobes contest. Sit down the smart programmer with the smart call-center person and watch what happens. The celebrity-earlobes contest ends sooner than expected, for one thing.
Another great match is ops and sales. Operations can figure out the processes to support the extra orders sales brings in before they happen. Imagine that. And because it’s part of the development of the overall product it falls under marketing’s purview – or at least, you can pretend it does. It’s your until they make it not yours, anyway.
Does this work? Well, at one organization I was associated with the marketing department went through a detailed internal process aimed at identifying the opinion leaders within departments, they were brought together in a room with an independent facilitator, they were encouraged to brainstorm way outside of their silos, they engaged in freeform discussions and more structured development sessions, and … nothing happened.
Nothing happened because the group had no power to make decisions or spend money, and it was controlled by its organizer, who wanted the group to rubber-stamp his ideas.
And there’s the rub in everyone-a-product-developer theory. Everyone-a-salesperson theory works because it suggests that everyone in an organization should be engaged with the outside world on behalf of that organization. The every-one-a-product-developer theory forces everyone back inside, to make what they sell more appealing to those on the outside. That threatens existing protocols and structures and makes people stiffen into organizational Republicans, vowing to fight to the death for the right to write SQL as they see fit.
It's hard to encourage people in an organization to think of themselves as product developers, but if they don't, the organization runs the risk of hitting the street with products that no one inside the organization believes is the best product possible. And believe me, you don't want that. That and cholera.
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