To my mind, CMOs and CTOs have are challenged to understand each other because their goals are often so disparate – not that they should be, but they are. The CMO walks into each new organization understanding from the outset that their longevity in the role is dictated by increased brand perception and, more importantly, increased revenue. A CMO often has to react quickly to competitive pressures and public relations problems and they expect their teams to be able to keep up with their demands. Technology is different.

The CTO faces different criteria for success. Very few top-level executives truly understand technology and don’t know how to tie the CTO’s job performance to corporate revenue. Instead, what’s important to the head of an organization is that the technology works – the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system doesn’t crash, a virus doesn’t steal data from company computers, etc. The CTO’s job often is just to keep the ship running with as little disruption as possible. Additionally, the CTO’s primary “customer,” if you will, is within the organization itself – the company’s employees. For those customers, it is sufficient if it takes 8-12 months to roll out updates to a popular application or if it takes eighteen months to implement a new system. It just so happens that 18-24 months is the average tenure for a CMO. In the eighteen months it takes to get a new system implemented, the CMO may come and go.

CMOs and CTOs live in different worlds. Bridging the gap between them won’t occur over night but it’s likely to be aided by steps in the right direction that involve sharing responsibility. These steps include:

1. Information Sharing – Even if marketing has to beg and plead for a resource, there should be, at the very least, a dedicated person from the technology team responsible for attending meetings for projects that will depend on the CTOs domain. Calling the tech team in at the last minute, or even midstream, creates challenges for both groups.




2. Freeing Up the Reins – The tech team has to acknowledge that marketing moves faster. Once this is done, it becomes a lot easier to provide marketing with a sandbox in which they can test emerging technologies and prototype and new marketing programs and systems. Deployment would be dependent upon the CTOs office but Information Sharing, above, would ensure the tech team was aware of what’s coming.




3. Dedicated Marketing Technology Department – Some companies call it e-Business or eCommerce. Others call it Marketing Technology. Whatever the name, it is a team dedicated to creating customer facing systems and programs for the marketing team and its partners. Reporting to a top level executive and partnered with the CMO and the CTO, the Marketing Technology team combines marketing and technology personnel in one group whose vision is singularly focused on the same objectives.




4. Top Level Involvement – In many organizations, the changes above will not receive more than lip service without the attention of the CEO, President or other high-ranking executive. Her involvement can make the difference between success and failure of such endeavors. By mandating that CMOs and CTOs meet frequently to discuss strategy and tactics, the chief executive ensures open lines of communication. These open lines will hopefully lead to partnership and trickle down to subordinates tasked to handle day-to-day activities within the groups.

I am not one who advocates merging the CMO and CTO roles. Each position requires an expert who has the skills necessary to understand the full scope of the role. However, given marketing’s ever-increasing dependence upon technology, it is important that each role be familiar with some of the details of the other. By following the steps above, organizations can begin creating CMO/CTO partnerships that lead to innovation and, ideally, success for both teams.

Someone in restaurant world has decided that practically every restaurant site must have either be built in Flash or, at the very least, have a Flash splash page. Here’s the problem. Flash is generally not available on most mobile phones. It is not available on the iPhone, which generates well over half of all mobile phone Internet traffic, or on the Blackberry. The fancy animations that load on restaurant sites cannot be seen by users on the most popular mobile phones and, in fact, cause the site to be totally unusable on those devices. You are losing customers — customers interested enough in visiting your restaurant that they’re looking it up at that very moment on their phone rather than waiting to get back to a computer with a bigger screen. It’s time to have a conversation with your web development company.

Questions to ask:

• Is our site built in Flash? Is the first page only viewable on devices that support Flash? If so, can it be fixed?
• Can we provide mobile visitors with an experience optimized for mobile devices?
• Since we know mobile site visitors are likely to want to visit in the near term, what can we do to entice them?

Getting the most value from your web site demands catering to the needs of your customers. Attending to the mobile site visitor will increase customer satisfaction and get more people into your dining room.

And though this is directed at restaurants, it goes for any site with that uses Flash for core site functionality. If customers can’t use your web site on their phone, they will spend their money elsewhere.

Finally, one caveat. This situation will not last forever. Most phone manufacturers are working with Adobe on the Open Screen Project to ensure that their phones can view Flash on web sites. Unfortunately, Apple and RIM (Blackberry) are not among them.

But, this brings me to another thing that bothers me about mobile carriers. Why are they in the phone selling business at all? Think about that iPhone for which you just paid $199. The PR spin is that the phone is so expensive that AT&T has to subsidize it. As a result, they have to lock you into a contract so they can recoup the losses they made subsidizing your phone. That may or may not be the total truth, however. What is never said is that the iPhone 3GS is estimated to cost Apple ~$179 to build. The unsubsidized price at AT&T is $599 (Apple sells it to AT&T, reportedly, for $399). That’s quite a hefty profit margin. Such margins are likely to make computer manufacturers and retailers very jealous since their margins are in the 10-20% range, if they’re lucky. The reality is the phone margins are artificially high. Manufacturers charge carriers more for phones than they would in a truly free market system because they know (and the carriers know) the carriers will make their money back on monthly fees for phone plans, text messaging and unlimited data. This is my own estimate but assuming even an optimistic 30% margin, the iPhone would likely go for around $235 if you could pick it up at your local electronics store and not have to worry about the carriers’ funny math.

To my mind, such cell phone antics both inhibits innovation and artificially stifles demand. Regardless of the phone I get, the two year contract makes it likely I won’t consider upgrading to another phone as long as I’m under contract. After all, why would I want to pay the unsubsidized (artificially high) price for a phone even if my current one is outdated and no longer suits my needs. I may want the brand new handy dandy phone, at the unsubsidized price of $600 it just wouldn’t make sense – not if I can wait a year until my contract is up and pay $200. Demand is squashed. If demand was higher, the mobile innovation curve would undoubtedly change for the better.

As far as I’m concerned, like your telephone provider, mobile carriers should only provide the connectivity on which the phones work. They should leave the devices and app stores to be managed by the free market which would put customers’ needs first. Carriers would protest that people expect them to assume responsibility for supporting their phones. Well, we expected AT&T to handle our phones when it was a monopoly, too. We got over it post-monopoly and became pretty used to buying phones and upgrading when the mood hit us. Let’s hope it doesn’t take government regulation to get the carriers to start acting in the best interests of consumers…

Disclaimer: I have service from both AT&T and Verizon and am generally satisfied with both – though I sometimes disagree with their business methods.

Dell became great during a time when differentiation didn’t matter. In fact, their business model is built on a lack of differentiation between devices. Their strength is their ability to offer cheaper prices because of scale. Cheaper prices haven’t been all that important in the mobile phone business. If people like a phone, they pay for it. Dell likely went to the carriers trying to get an exclusivity deal and “differentiation” absolutely matters there. Danger could have offered Dell some opportunity for differentiation by extending the range of their platform, but Microsoft snapped them up.

Given the economy, there may be some hope for them if they can get something out fast. A low-priced smartphone targeting parents and their tweens/teens could have some legs if it offered great parent-centric features without seeming too restrictive to the kids. Similarly, though RIM and Apple own the hearts of the most savvy cell phone users, most cell phones are a few years old and are dumb. In keeping with their business model, there’s a great opportunity for Dell to reach those users who need to upgrade because they want new features but don’t need the whiz-bang technologies of a Blackberry or the iPhone. That also happens to be a place where differentiation isn’t all that important as long as the target audience knows what the primary benefit is.

Dell has the heft to make a strong entry into the cell phone business. I’m they’re keeping their eye on the right bulls eye.

As I’ve previously indicated in this blog, I love mobile. As such, I’ve recently imbibed on the iPhone Kool-Aid and have taken up investigating iPhone application opportunities. In doing so, I began to realize something interesting — marketers are right back in 1995 with their engage-the-masses, cross-our-fingers mindset. Case in point… Target. Yes, Target.

A recent article from USA Today indicates that consumers are trading down and companies like Target are being hurt in the process as consumers switch to WalMart and other lower cost alternatives. Per the article, Target’s net profit and same stores sales were both down last quarter as a result of consumers’ new found frugality. To my mind, Target is missing something because some shoppers should be trading down to it. And which shoppers in particular do I think should be schlepping into Target – everyone’s favorite customer, the 18-34 crowd.

This group, most recently flush with money either from their parents or from high-paying jobs, has shopped at Target and target.com for incidentals, but rarely for clothes. That’s what boutiques and mid to high-end stores were for, but not anymore. Those jobs are fading and parents’ portfolios aren’t what they used to be. The over abundance of money has faded, but this audience of fashionistas, urban hipsters, college students and young moms still have to purchase things someplace and to my mind Target and target.com should be that place.

Now, before I go on, I’d like to point out that much of what I’m about to say is based on anecdotal evidence. Though research indicates men are most likely to buy iPhones, my experience is that a significant number of women apt to shop at Target use iPhones. Additionally, more recent research tells us that iPhone owners are becoming more diverse and that since the launch of the iPhone 3G “the strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income.”

I say all of this to say what. It’s time for brands like Target to act. Target has an application on the iPhone App Store that allows people to choose gifts for others. I can only imagine what users of the app are thinking – “What about me?” Gifts for others are great, but as a person who knows a thing or two about being selfish, I want to know how an app can help me. To that end, iPhone apps offer retailers like Target, who are losing their cachet, an opportunity to “speak” to buyers who are trading down. They may not be able to shop at Pottery Barn or Nordstrom, but they still need to buy things. An iPhone application can hone in on what they want and present it to them with an experience unique to the iPhone. Make users’ lives easier. Moreover, the device can encourage online purchases or offer unique opportunities that drive traffic to local stores – helping to maintain same store sales rates. To paraphrase speculators in the old West, “There’s gold in them iPhone hills.”

This entry is lengthy enough, but there’s something I like to remind people of with regard to marketing with new technologies:

• From platform to platform and technology to technology … marketing is marketing is marketing

To that end, remember to:

1. Always segment and focus on customers’ needs and making their lives easier
2. Seek out new opportunities with new technologies. Don’t use one technology the same way you’d use another. Innovate.
3. Stay true to your core. Don’t stray from who you are and your core brand message. You can lose your audience and it’s too hard to get back to center.

Everyone, it seems, is creating the next iPhone. Google’s G1 is the most recent device to throw its hat into the ring, but they’re not at all alone. Blackberry is on its way with the (initially) Verizon Wireless marketed “Storm”, also called the Thunder. Nokia will soon be launching the Nokia 5800 Tube, the first phone that implements its S60 Touch UI. And, let’s not forget the Samsung Instinct, which actually sold well, and their beautiful but not yet available in the States, Samsung Innov8. Each of these phones are being released to provide competition to the iPhone – in some ways, to be the next, but better, iPhone. I’m sick of it.

The iPhone is a great phone. I do not have one, but often wish I did. My Nokia N95 is very nice, but there’s something excellent about a touch screen. I like the idea of being able to browse the web almost as I would on my desktop or notebook. I think the UI is amazing – especially for a company taking a first shot (technically, 2nd if you include the Newton) at a mobile OS. It’s size is almost perfect and now that it has 3G, it really is a killer phone. The thing is, for what they did, they nailed it. They got it right. They left little room for error and the marketplace acknowledges that with its demand. Given that, why is everyone stuck on creating the next iPhone? Apple created the next iPhone with the 3G iPhone.

The phone manufacturers should be looking at creating some above and beyond the iPhone. RIM should be looking at creating the next Blackberry, Nokia, the next Nokia and Samsung, the next Samsung. What does that mean? These companies need to focus on their strengths. RIM should be looking to revolutionize what business users can do on their touch-screen Crackberries. People should feel almost as if they don’t even need their laptop because they can do 75% of what they need to do on the Blackberry. Nokia, on the other hand, should focus on reliability, functionality and its ability to stay slightly ahead of the curve. Nokia doesn’t create the greatest looking phones. They create the most reliable phones and, with its S60 platform, highly functional phones with lots of capabilities. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell Samsung does well, but people are beginning to like their phones judging by the reaction to the Sprint Instinct and the Innov8.

To my mind, each of these companies will only succeed if they stick to their core strengths and stop worrying about the iPhone so much. If Blackberry users wanted an iPhone, they’d buy one (and may have already), but they’d likely still keep their Blackberry. If, as an N95 owner, I wanted an iPhone, I’d go out and get one, but I trust Nokia’s reliability and like the options I have with the N95. When competing with the iPhone, other manufacturers will only be also-rans and the more time they spend competing solely against the iPhone, the more time they will spend as also-rans. It’s a sad truth. However, if they focus on their core strategies, do what they do well and bring devices to market that exceed expectations, they easily stand more than a fighting chance of giving the iPhone true competition.