Marketing begins with assumptions.
Assumptions about the dynamics of the marketplace itself and how we can play to our own strengths. About core values and how to iconize them through positioning and branding. About how to craft a story and communicate it organically across customers, communities and partners.
In large companies, each uniquely different with their own siloed systems and innate group politics, there is one core assumption that crosses most of them as a starting point.
Be they Disney or the NBA, the City of New York or Whole Foods Markets, Dell. Or for that matter Google or Facebook.
Their brands are their single largest asset that each and every one of them is wired to control at every touch point that surrounds it.
Sometimes this means owning the entire ecosystem on both sides of the supply and delivery chains.
You really need to internalize that the enterprise is the polar opposite of a startup from this perspective.
In startups, we wake up every day to build our market and scratch our way to market fit any way we can. Our brands are the sharp edge of our aspirations.
The enterprise wakes up in a multitude of places, well resourced and carefully working to insure that they aren’t losing market share.
They live by trend lines–even innovation is as much a gateway to new customers and channels–as simply creative fodder for reconsolidating what they already have. To them their brands are nothing less than the aggregate of their market value.
That’s a place to start.
You need to step back to understand this strategically, discovering a selling and marketing point of view that can get you a seat at the table where decisions are made. And equally, a spot in the minds of their end customers all the while respecting the control that they demand.
Direct to customer sales are honestly so much simpler—in concept at least. You have to visualize only one behavior in one vernacular.
With the enterprise, you need to understand not simply them as your customer. But the behaviors of their customers. The dynamics of their developer community down on through distribution and support.
You need to think this through strategically from the very top down. Then tactically from the bottom up.
Large companies are really complex but they are understandable.
They are slow to move but once in motion, can create an endless waves that roll onwards indefinitely.
I know this to be true but we also need to be cognizant that the very markets around the enterprise are in flux and changing.
Less than a decade ago, marketing was simply an adjunct to sales. Not the case today.
As a rule, we still sell one-to-one vertically into big companies but we market one-to-many or often many-to-many horizontally across the various communities that comprise their supply and delivery chains.
My buddy Tom Critchlow, who knows this market as well as anyone, thinks that how we market to the b2b segment and the enterprise, is almost indistinguishable from how we market b2c direct to consumers. And the differences are blurring fast.
He’s right on.
But along with the consumerization of the broader marketplace, there are at least two other pieces that feed into this.
First is how we position ourselves.
I’m a believer in gathering the team in a room and tearing the different pieces of the market apart one by one, value add by value add. Thinking through every piece of the value chain through every permutation.
Then wiping the board clean and starting over to discover the one that fits them all.
It takes a diversity of understanding to graph out how your product or data type plays in the market. How it touches the wants of the consumer. The excitement of the developers and the brand loyalty of the enterprise customer.
But at the end, in many cases, when captured right, they are very much the same.
Brands are simply living and breathing beliefs, captured in time in an image or idea. Crafted with meticulous care but honestly beyond our control. Owned by the end user and as malleable as the personalities who embrace them.
Second is that community is becoming the marketplace.
In many ways this has already happened.
There are platforms and groupings cross the web for every affinity and enthusiast group. And any number of discrete developer communities but the communities themselves and the market are becoming more horizontal and atomic by their very nature.
They intersect.They cross pollinate on shared momentum and inspiration. They are platformed and interconnected.
While how you market to enthusiasts and developers appears at times different, honestly, the similarities are greater than the distinctions.
The intersection of where you find customers and developers is not as disparate as you may imagine. Unique perhaps at times but often adjacent.
There is no accurate GPS that shows us how to get from a great product to the hearts and minds of enterprise customers and their end users.
But there is a blueprint of sorts.
Directional and built on learned perspective and core assumptions.
Try on the ones I’ve shared as a general starting point.
Do the work to understand the dynamics of your unique situation and craft something built on your own understanding and interpretation.
Be flexible and aware of the changes happening right now in the market. In the rising of community as a core structure of communications.
And don’t underestimate the unstoppable power of a story well told that touches a collective imagination across all your customers and communities.
With that, a great product, potentially even better team and your fair share of luck, you have a good place to start.
