On BuiltIn.com Now: RFPs Are a Waste of Precious Time

To reach new and more readers, I started to send out articles for publication—articles that would have otherwise appeared in these pages.

Technology-focused Built In has been kind enough to run two of my pieces, so far. Here’s the latest:

RFPs Are a Waste of Precious Time. Here’s a Better Way to Hire an Agency.

There’s a wealth of highly specialized marketing talent available to brands today, but few brand managers know exactly where to look to find a good fit for their most pressing needs.

Sure, the brand manager may read the trades — and maybe she has a robust network of peers to tap for recommendations — but that’s not the most reliable pathway to take when the business need is acute and the need for an answer is long past due.

Please read the full article on BuiltIn.com, provided that you’re interested in taking the puffery out of the pitch process.

Why Technology Marketers Tend to Struggle

My first article for Built In addresses client blindspots, which can be particularly prevalent in technology companies that are led by a founder.

When the Product Does All the Talking, Where Does Brand Marketing Fit In?

I have met with and worked closely with tech leaders with pronounced brand marketing blind spots. Typically, these were the result of the tech entrepreneur’s engineering mindset. Engineers may see brand marketing as frivolous; in their mind, all the genius is in the product.

The engineer also wants to convey all the facts under the sun about the new gizmo, without ever stopping to consider the capacity of the buyer to take in and weigh this kind of information — or how it will position the new company in the buyer’s mind.

I’ve also witnessed the very same people who say, “We want to be like Apple,” at the outset of the client/agency relationship, make that wish impossible to fulfill.

Being like Apple means that every decision and move made from that point on will honor the customer. It also means placing design and brand experience at the center of the entire organization.

In a company like Apple, products and services are created to surprise and delight people. In almost every other technology company, pleasing the customer is merely an assumption that gets made by uninformed executives. Meanwhile, Apple is busy earning everyone’s attention.