Struggling to turn science into commerce | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

Cambridge struggling to turn science into commerce?

July 17th, 2009

Susan Bratton of DishyMix (what a great name!) has posted an overview of the Travelling Geeks day in Cambridge

Susan makes this observation,

Cambridge is strong in the sciences and computer technology. They have a Angel and VC infrastructure. They have consulting companies to patent and develop products. But what they consistently said they are lacking is “commercialization” skills: PR, marketing and sales. If I didn’t have my own early stage company with Personal Life Media, I would love to move to Cambridge and set up a launch services business. After launching so many companies in Silicon Valley, it would be a delight to bring some of Cambridge’s innovation to market.

And I tend to agree with her. So the next thing is what to do about it? Marketing has to start with the product, with an obsessive focus on excellence. James Dyson has proved that point.

Thought leadership comes close behind, and this is a combination of books, whitepapers, speaking engagements, events, blogs, tweets, podcasts; much of which is about intellectual and social capital vs. bought media. As Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems said, “my 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done.” Do not underestimate People Power and the strength that comes from of being seen as behaving authentically.

The mantra of today’s marketing must be about “engagement,” which means unless businesses can provide a compelling reason for your selected audience to find you, engage with you, share with you, admire you and trust you – you will not succeed. Also, everyone is a marketer, everyone is a representative of the company, there are no ‘campaigns’ as marketing is something that must be done 365 days of the year. There is ‘no online or offline,’ said William Gibson, ‘there is only blended reality.’ And that is also how marketing operates.

I ask people, what is advertising? They say: a billboard a press ad, a TV spot. I say that is but the furniture of marketing and advertising, some of which we have dragged from 500 years ago into the age of the web and some of you even think that this can be applied to the mobile. In the Networked Society it is the quality of the communications from one-to-one, one-to-many, or indeed, many-to-many, that defines success.

Unfortunately this is where it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong in the UK – as our media infrastructures, marketing companies, and businesses fail to grasp the handles of the new learning curve. for example, a company in Spain called Bloguzz, has found a means to articulate how certain bloggers in Spain have certain influence, they then contact these bloggers and ask them to engage in a companies product, brand, service. These bloggers are not paid to write, and they can write whatever they want – good or bad. This company has acheived results in awareness and direct influence on sales with budgets that are miniscule in comparison to other marketing costs.

Why is that? because they understand Networks of Trust operate in a differently. There are so many ways to reach, connect, engage ones audiences, by doing some basic stuff well. In some senses its not rocket science, but it does require a different mindset

The approach to marketing in the 21st Century must be different, that is why I wrote Communities Dominate Brands: business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century (Futuretext 2005). A book I might add, that the then head of the IPA refused to endorse as he described it as a polemic! In CDB I introduced and explored the idea of Engagement, and Engagement Marketing as a solution to the crisis of traditional marketing, and also put forward a business model framework called the 4C’s: Commerce, Culture, Community, Connectivity. As a co-author of Social Media Marketing: How data analytics helps to monetize the user base in telecoms, social networks, media and advertising in a converged ecosystem. I introduced the idea of: Social Marketing Intelligence, and the metric CPRA – Cost Per Relevant Audience, and explored how marketing is best practised in a converged eco-system in what Doc Searls calls the “intention economy”.

We are a cussed lot in the UK – my challenge is that we are unable to explore innovation in the way our brothers and sisters do across the water. As a consequence, we see legacy companies failing, unable to adapt, and we see those that want to succeed unable to do so properly as they so not have the right insight, knowledge of the right knowledge to do the things they need to do.

Frankly, I have become frustrated at the slow pace of fast chnage in the UK, but I have identified that part of the problem is massive lnowledge gaps; we need a new language, and common sense, philosophy and framework and this is something that SMLXL is exploring in its No Straight Lines project which we are piloting with several business schools in the UK right now.

However – I might add looking at this the other way round – has innovation in Silicon Fen really understood world class marketing, in all its myriad forms. I make this observation from the work I have done with technology companies, including Nokia – that every company has its own DNA, regions and cities also have their own DNA – and Cambridge as a deep science and technology DNA – it may well be that culturally it has not up to this point recognised that world class marketing is as important as all the other component parts of a successful company?

There is much work to be done, and perhaps technologists, innovators and marketers should learn to talk to each other a bit more? Understand each others language. So I am happy to meet and talk to any companies in Cambridge that want help, insight and advice on how to become world class marketing companies.

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