Reputation to Revenue

Reengineering the white paper, part 1

Several months ago, I began talking with colleagues Bob Buday and Tim Parker about "reengineering the white paper." Our basic idea was that, although white papers have flooded the Web for years, and more and more companies are investing in them to help demonstrate expertise and thought leadership, the reality is that most of them are pretty bad. They're unoriginal, boring, and overly promotional, which pretty much rules out having the intended impact of generating interest and leads.

Despite their common failings, however, we're still firm believers that white papers can be one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox...if they are developed and marketed the right way.

Having worked on and marketed countless white papers ourselves, we think we know the right way. 

The first part of our three-part series, "Developing a Point of View," explores the aspect of white paper production that is most often lacking: the creation of a powerful, credible, and novel argument about how to address an important business challenge. Subsequent parts will focus on marketing white papers and overcoming the typical organizational obstacles in creating and marketing them effectively.

The first and biggest mistake companies make, we argue, is treating white papers primarily as writing assignments. Instead, they should be viewed as projects to create strong and distinct points of view -- which subsequently can be written up in a white paper. Good writing is obviously important, but the bulk of the work in building an argument, gathering evidence, creating new frameworks and so on should precede the writing.

I don't want to repeat the whole article here, but I do hope you'll give it a look and let me know what you think. Given the amount of time and money spent on white papers these days, the impact of a more effective way to produce them can be substantial indeed. 

Photo by kevindooley. 

Winning with thought leadership: Six lessons from IBM and Deloitte

B2B marketers know they need to invest in thought leadership, and many have indeed invested more during the last few years. Making the most of these investments, however, rests on having the right answers to a set of difficult questions:

• What topics should we highlight?
• How should we produce and package thought leadership content?
• How should we promote it?
• How can we measure success?

Absent good answers, thought leadership initiatives quickly fall prey to more traditional priorities around lead generation and sale support. The irony, of course, is that good thought leadership has increasingly become a prerequisite to making lead generation and sales support actually work with high value deals. Absent something interesting to talk about related to core customer issues, would-be buyers pay little attention to straight-on sales pitches.

ITSMA's announcement last week of the winners of its annual Marketing Excellence Awards featured two great examples of thought leadership marketing from IBM and Deloitte. Although few companies have committed to thought leadership investment at anywhere near the level of IBM and Deloitte, the basic lessons from their winning initiatives are totally applicable to any B2B firm that needs thought leadership. 

Full disclosure: I served as a judge for this year's awards program and used to run the whole program when I worked for ITSMA. And, yes, I cast my votes for both winning initiatives, so was pleased that the other judges agreed.

The Global CEO Study

IBM's biennial Global CEO Study is a massive undertaking focused on digging deep into top CEO concerns around the world. The 2008 edition, "The Enterprise of the Future," involved face-to-face interviews with 1,130 CEOs and public sector leaders from large organizations in some 40 countries. Released publicly in May 2008, the core report highlighted five strategic attributes that CEOs are trying to build into their organizations:

• Hungry for change
• Innovative beyond customer imagination
• Globally integrated
• Disruptive by nature
• Genuine, not just generous

Filled with data and analysis by industry, region, and more, the IBM report provides a wonderfully insightful look at how CEOs are dealing with the biggest questions of business strategy, culture, and organization.

The Risk Intelligent Enterprise

Deloitte's Risk Intelligent Enterprise program also addresses some meaty concerns: how companies should think about risk at the most strategic level. Through a series of white papers and other thought leadership publications and activities, Deloitte has taken a strong stand on what "risk intelligence" actually means, how it relates to business strategy, and how to operationalize it across the organization in even the most complex environments.

Perhaps most important, the Deloitte program highlights the idea that risk management is not just about avoiding overly risky behavior, but also about taking intelligent risks in a properly managed way to support growth and change.

Based on ongoing research as well as Deloitte's extensive experience working on risk management with companies of all stripes, the Risk Intelligent Enterprise program helps companies understand one of today's most critical management issues in a thoughtful, creative, and responsible way.

Lessons Learned

Stepping back from the specifics of these two initiatives, I see six general lessons for thought leadership marketers at any level:

1. Put Customers First. It sounds obvious to say that thought leadership marketing should focus on what your customers really care about, but far too many marketers take a product- or solution-first approach and try to fit some larger issue neatly around their offering. Buyers don't care about your offerings by themselves; they have their own problems to worry about. Engage them where they live. IBM is trying to build relationships with CEOs, so they research and talk about what other CEOs are doing. Deloitte works especially closely with Boards of Directors, CFOs, and other C-level executives; it's hard to think of a C-suite issue more pressing these days than risk management. What do your customers and prospects really are about?
2. Do the Research. Thought leadership without real research is just opinion, and opinions are a dime a dozen. Show buyers serious research, though, and they're much more likely to pay attention. You might not be able to interview 1,130 CEOs around the world, but you can survey and interview your customers and prospects, produce serious case studies (not puff piece "success stories"), and comb the literature and online conversation to produce new insights.
3. Say Something New. Thought leadership without a differentiated point of view is just an echo of conventional wisdom. Why should customers listen to your version then they've already heard it before -- or if you're only telling them something they already know. Smart customers want to be challenged. If you're not sparking at least some disagreement and debate, you probably haven't said anything new. None of IBM's five attributes are themselves shockingly new but the synthesis suggests and aggressive and innovative approach that goes well beyond conventional thinking. Deloitte's focus on the upside as well as the downside of risk clearly stands apart from the post-Wall Street collapse mentality of compliance first, last, and always.
4. Build a Pervasive Presence. Long gone are the days when thought leadership marketing meant publishing a white paper, research report, or journal article and then moving on to the next project. Media fragmentation, information overload, and the power of social media make it critical that thought leadership marketers put substantial energy into getting the word out across a broad range of media and activities. IBM's 360 degree campaign for the CEO study included traditional activities (email, Web, direct mail, advertising, press and analyst briefings, sales enablement, video, etc.) as well as a number of newer approaches (blogs, podcasts, online innovation jams, and branded content). IBM also produced 15 "flavors" of the main report for different industries and C-suite positions. Deloitte has similarly tapped a wide variety of media and activities to engage clients, prospects, and market influencers. For thought leadership marketing today, think multi-media, social media, and complementary online and offline engagement to build a strong presence wherever your stakeholders already spend their time.
5. Stick with It. IBM's CEO study is a two year project, and the 2008 version is IBM's third such study. To maximize marketing impact, IBM organizes a "teaser phase" (outreach to build awareness before the formal launch), a "reveal phase" (a multi-faceted public launch to build buzz internally and externally), and a "sustain phase" (ongoing engagement to dig more deeply into the issues with customers and others). Deloitte launched the Risk Intelligent Enterprise effort in 2006 and has continued to explore the issues, refine the point of view, publish, and engage. The point is to pick a core issue for your customers and stick with it. Thought leadership takes time. It's better to pick one or two issues and work them hard for several years than to flit from one issue to the next in a more superficial way.
6. Confirm the metrics. Far from an airy initiative, thought leadership marketing can and should focus on core metrics essential to business development and growth. Objectives for the IBM initiative revolved around relationship building with CEOs, corporate visibility and interest, ongoing engagement with key contacts, and sales leads. Deloitte takes a similar approach, focusing on competitive differentiation, influencer relations, client connections, and business development support. Setting and gaining organizational agreement on clear marketing and business development objectives provides the grounding and accountability that marketers need to justify the necessary investments.

Serious thought leadership marketing is not easy, but taking these six lessons to heart will go a long way toward success. At least that's my opinion! What do you think?

The power of video: Outsourcing reality show illuminates the buying process

About a month ago, the good folks at the Outsourcing Institute asked me to contribute some  "lessons" for services marketers based on their web-based reality show, The Transaction. No cash involved, but it sounded like an quick PR hit for me while helping out a great organization. 

When I checked out the series, however, I realized this was a much bigger deal. Endless "experts" (including, at times, me!) pontificate about what companies need to do to market and sell high-stakes services. Some of the advice is even good. But capturing the real feel for such a complex process is extremely difficult.

The Transaction documents on video the real-life effort of a buyer team from Kodak in its effort to find and hire an outside firm to handle all of Kodak's recruitment, hiring, and on-boarding of new employees. A marketing and sales reality show, no less.

The brainchild of Outsourcing Institute CEO Frank Casale, the video series (each episode is under 15 minutes) documents critical moments throughout the buying process, from initial conception to signing the deal. 

Kodak begins with a list of some 50 providers to consider, narrows the list through research and due diligence, creates a finalist pool, and moves to a final decision (spoiler alert: although the final episode is not yet posted, the actual deal went down last year when Kodak signed a three-year contract with HR outsourcer Pinstripe). 

Episode 7, the one for which I provided some lessons learned, shows the team debriefing its recent site visits to two finalist candidates. 

Overall, it's a wonderful way to provide real insight into the buying process, something that all marketers struggle to understand -- and that the vast majority of case studies, white papers, conference presentations and the like do little to illuminate. 

And make no mistake, it's a buying process, not a sales process. The Kodak team is anxious to decide (the whole process in this case was less than two months), but they are firmly in control. Marketers (and sales people) would do well to keep this basic reality at the forefront of their thinking.

So kudos to the Outsourcing Institute for creating the series and to Kodak for being brave enough to allow their buying team to work on camera. A definite thumbs up from this satisfied viewer.

It's all about lead gen now...or is it?

 

Rich Vancil, head of IDC's CMO Advisory Service, provided a great state of the tech marketing union this week at the IDC DIrections conference in Boston. It's not great, of course, with IDC projecting 10% marketing budget cuts for 2009 -- which pretty much validates what I've been hearing anecdotally from clients and other friends across the industry.

More important, as Rich pointed out, is the reshaping of marketing budgets in response to the downturn. Cuts are not coming across the board in most companies; they're focused especially on the top of the funnel. The deepest cuts, according to IDC, are coming in branding, advertising, sponsorships, and "big tent" events (conferences and trade shows). 

The other area of real cuts (although not as deep), is what Rich called "the brains of the operation" -- marketing strategy and operations, PR and AR, marketing and customer intelligence, and product, industry, and solutions marketing.

Further down the funnel, spending is either flat or even increasing. The closer you get to sales, not surprisingly, the better the budget picture looks. IDC sees modest increases this year in lead management, sales enablement, and, of course, actual selling.

Writ large, it's a shift from marketing operations and building awareness to generating demand and directly supporting sales. In better times, Rich noted, the balance is typically 50-50; it's now skewed heavily toward generating demand and enabling sales.

Again, nothing shocking here; pretty much every marketer I talk to says it's all about lead gen right now. If you can't point to a direct, near-term impact on revenue, don't bother bringing it up.

Personally, I think a lot of marketing groups are going overboard in shifting priorities. Iunderstand the pressure to move the needle on sales. I just don't agree that cutting into the brains of the organization is the best way forward.

As such, I was heartened to hear Eric Andrews, head of worldwide demand generation for IBM, take a different tack. During a marketing executive panel the same day, Andrews stated that IBM's biggest marketing initiative right now is "driving brand and differentiation across all audiences." 

Building on its new Smarter Planet theme, IBM is investing heavily in advertising, content development, and, perhaps most important, customer conversation about the broad business issues under the Smarter Planet umbrella: energy, water, transportation, health care, and so on. 

The effort is certainly aligned with sales, and, in fact, the company is pushing additional marketing resources into the field to get closer to sales. But the important point is that IBM is leading with brainpower, with ideas, with thought leadership, and with brand. In an environment where buyers are tuning out every type of sales pitch, and looking for every reason NOT to buy, it is only by engaging them with new thinking and new ideas that you really have a chance to get into the conversation in the first place. And without that conversation, forget about the sale.

In the end, it's too easy to just say "we need more leads." Of course we all need more business. But what really matters, and what will make or break our results, is how we go about it.

What do you think?

Photo credit: dierk schaefer

Stress test for thought leadership: Are you ready?

Consider the following scenario: After a few weeks of back and forth with a prominent business journal, your PR person gets the go-ahead to submit a 400 word contribution to an ongoing forum on a critical issue for the senior executives in your target market. 

For example, Sloan Management Review is currently running an Executive Roundtable on "Capturing the Green Advantage," with short pieces by top executives from Interface, Boston Consulting Group, Intel, EMC, and others.

You think sustainability is a big opportunity, and you'd love the chance to show off your vision and work in this area to such a great audience. Sloan Management Review is going to reach a lot more C-level executives than your own publications ever could.

Are you ready? Would you know what to say?

No doubt you can dash off something interesting in 400 words. But would it reflect your firm's point of view? Would it stand out as interesting, different, engaging, credible? Would it advance your firm's reputation and suggest that you really do have the expertise to help clients address the issue at hand?

Lots of firms are trying to present themselves as thought leaders in their markets. Too often, however, they produce a disconnected set of white papers, articles, presentations, and perhaps blogs, podcasts, and videos that are, to be blunt, neither very thoughtful nor really leading anything. Faced with an opportunity like the one above, they have to scramble to figure out what angle to take, and it won't necessarily line up with most of the other materials sitting on their site.

On the other hand, firms with a well developed point of view on strategic issues like sustainability (or whatever your customers' priorities may be) would have little trouble with the opportunity above -- they have a solid foundation upon which to build. It probably took them longer to build that foundation than it took others to just crank out a set of disconnected white papers, but the hardest work is up front. Once the point of view is in place, it's much easier to produce a steady stream of articles, reports, blog posts, videos, presentations, briefings, and external commentaries that reflect and reinforce that core perspective. 

Developing a strong and differentiated point of view on core issues for your clients is hard work, and easy to forgo, especially in today's economy when short term lead and revenue generation dominate all marketing conversation. For high value services and solutions, though, it's awfully hard to generate leads and revenue without standing out from the crowd.

What do you think? 

Photo credit: House of Sims

Social media reality check: Predictions for 2009

Amid the inevitable and generally useless flood of predictions for 2009, Peter Kim published a useful e-book today on Social Media Predictions 2009 (pdf). Based on the contributions of 14 other experts, the document covers a wide range of issues, from metrics and mobile to budget and B2B.

What I found most interesting, however, was the relatively sober tone of many of the contributors after the last several years of incredible social media hype. 

Partly this is just economic reality. Even as the advocates expect a greater push toward social media as potentially cheaper than other marketing programs, several also expect a shakeout of Web 2.0 firms as the reality of questionable (or no) business models finally catches up to them. As Chris Brogan noted, "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." 

And from the marketing side, as Jeremiah Owyang states,"The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies--marketing must prove its worth to actually changing the bottom line."

More important, from the large company perspective, is the growing recognition that social media is hard! The contributors themselves are all social media stars, of course, (and mostly consultants ready and able to help), but their success doesn't translate so easily at the enterprise level.

As David Armano explains:

In 2008 we saw many organizations taking Web 2.0 very seriously moving from 'why' to 'how' they should implement these new strategies and tactics. In 2009, reality will set in--big time...

Organizations will come to terms with the reality that although it is now 'cheaper' to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology--it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful. This will not be easy for many businesses/brands as it brings up a host of issues ranging from empowering employees & agencies to have direct contact with customers, to staffing up projects differently.

Meanwhile, as both Pete Blackshaw and Charlene Li argue, the rush to quantity (more, more, more connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may shift the other way. For Blackshaw:

Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering 'what did we eat?' -- everything from hastily assembled friends list to Twitter followers to groups, apps, and widgets that we 'impulse adopted' (usually while shadowing others) yet rarely revisited. Some of us will join the Social Media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of 'don't follow everything' discipline.

More people backing away from "following everything" means we marketers will have to work that much harder to get them to follow us.

Todd Defren thinks that many more B2B companies will join the party in 2009. I certainly hope so, but if they do, they'll probably need to follow two other trends:

• Companies Increasingly Crafting Content. For Ann Handley, the important news is that "organizations are increasingly focusing on producing kick-ass content to attract and retain customers, rather than randomly grabbing folks off the street." Moreover, Handley notes, the sad news of a new wave of unemployed journalists and editors might have a silver lining if companies look in their direction for help in creating more compelling content.  
• Velvet Rope Social Networks. For Chris Brogan, "the real interest will be in making targeted networks that aren't 'come one, come all.' Companies instead will focus on narrower networks for specific industry verticals and interest groups. 

All in all, I remain bullish on social media marketing for B2B next year, but it's certainly helpful to have a more realistic attitude about the challenges of doing it well. Huge kudos to Peter Kim for pulling together such a useful guide.

Widget time for B2B?

Bob Garfield has a great long piece in AdAge today asking why more marketers aren't using widgets. Since Garfield is one of the more thoughtful commentators on the state of advertising today, I usually wade through his long pieces, and this one is well worth it. (Meanwhile, if you haven't read them, Garfield also penned seminal pieces back in 2005 on the "Chaos Scenario" facing the marketing industry, and the rise of "Listenomics.") 

Widgets are mini-software applications that sit on your computer, smart phone, home page, or social networking site and provide a simple news feed, video player, interactive game, or simulation. They are typically designed to bring the user back to a full website and often designed to go viral. Apple, among others, helped bring them to life with the Dashboard on OSX and the wildly popular apps and App Store on the iPhone. Facebook and MySpace have also done a great job popularizing the approach, and a number of agencies now specialize in developing widgets for advertising campaigns.

The basic idea is to give people a bit of your brand in the form of digital information or entertainment, and they've begun to catch on big time in the B2C world. For example, Southwest Airlines' "Ding" widget alerts users to special fares, Backcountry.com's Steep and Cheap highlights great new deals, and InStyle's Hollywood Hair Makeover lets users put celebrity do's on their own photos for fun and to help with copycat styling. Garfield, in a memorable turn of phrase, suggests that "branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World."

But what about B2B? Can widgets work in the more sober world of high-value solutions? I'd say absolutely yes, and Garfield himself suggests a few possible directions. UPS already has a widget to help users schedule and track shipments. Nike has a widget to help users keep up with their running and connect more easily to Nike Plus. Why not borrow the same concept for business users by providing simple, ongoing access to technical support, professional advice, or industry news?

Widgets are just another tool, of course, in a marketing environment overloaded with new tools. Viewed in a B2B context, though, they offer a number of potential advantages as marketers adapt their strategies to the demands of time-starved, buyer-driven markets:

• Enables you to go where the users already spend time, rather than relying on them to come to your site
• Emphasis on providing value to the user, otherwise they'll pay no attention
• Simple and inexpensive to produce and track -- and thus to experiment with
• Potential for ongoing engagement with the user  
• Natural tie-in with other value-providing tactics, including live and online events and publications  

Content, as always, is king in B2B marketing, so any widget promotion should come only as support for a clear and compelling content strategy. That said, however, why not give it a try?

Cisco's big think approach to emerging markets

For years, technology companies have tried to move up the value chain by promoting big ideas that would drive sales of premium business solutions rather than commodity products and services. It certainly makes sense, and some firms do it pretty well, but it's easier said than done.

Cisco, according to BusinessWeek, is now trying to move WAY up the value chain, looking to design whole cities, among other "projects" in emerging markets such as Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Chile.

"Cisco isn't just selling technology. [SVP Paul] Mountford's pitch is that Cisco, more than any other company, can help countries such as Saudi Arabia modernize their economies and become leaders in the Internet Age. The company argues that, by investing in the Internet infrastructure Cisco sells, these governments can better educate their citizens, improve health care, and boost national productivity. They may even be able to create their own tech sectors, giving citizens the opportunity to become  well-paid 'knowledge workers like those in Bangalore or Guangdong, China."

The effort, as tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore explains, "is getting itself designed into the fabric of these countries' economic plans, because Cisco is helping their leaders imagine the future." 

Pretty ambitious, to say the least. And extremely challenging, as BusinessWeek also notes, given the economic slowdown, intense competition from Cisco rivals, and the tremendous internal demands it places on Cisco's own experts to actually live up to the hype and deliver the goods.

But I think the time is right. For one thing, industry leaders like Cisco need to be bold in finding new markets to maintain their momentum. For another, as I wrote recently about IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, attaching ourselves in an authentic way to causes larger than ourselves (or companies) may well be the most effective way to go to market in this time of great change.

What do you think?

Stop experimenting online? I don't think so.

Today's Wall Street Journal suggests (subscription required) that the financial crisis will likely slow down marketing experimentation with new online approaches:

In recent years, marketers have set aside a portion of their ad budgets to experiment with digital technologies such as Web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds. But with broader economic turmoil reaching Madison Avenue, these "experimental" budgets are among the first to hit the cutting-room floor.

It's not surprising. Marketing typically gets hit first in a downturn, and cutting new and relatively unproven techniques is a natural reaction. As Peter Kim from the agency Dachis tells the Journal, "When we get into the need to drive results, you can't spend money on experiments and hope to keep your job and get your sales goals."

It's not surprising, but I also think it's dead wrong. I'm not advocating tossing money around randomly on flavor of the month tools or techniques. But the implication of stopping experimentation is that the old methods work best. We know that's not true. We know that many traditional approaches don't work at all anymore, or are decreasingly effective. And we can  be pretty sure that some  of the old ways will be even less effective as the economy goes south. Think about live events, for example. Attendance levels, already under stress from event overload, will only get worse as travel budgets freeze up.

In fact, experimentation is the lifeblood of marketing. Websites and email were experimental in the mid-1990s (or later, in many companies), and considered of marginal value at best. Now they are the center of most companies' marketing programs. Blogging was laughed at just a few years ago; now it has entered the business marketing mainstream.

Consider HP's recent stunning success with its 31 Days of the Dragon campaign to promote a new high-end laptop oriented to users focused on entertainment and gaming (see MarketingProfs' great case study for details). Although the  Dragon laptop received good reviews when it first came out last year, sales were disappointing. Rather than just bump up traditional advertising and other promotional efforts, HP instead tried something very different. HP reached out to 31 bloggers with great influence in the target audience, and offered them a deal: We'll give you a full Dragon package, including all sorts of add-ons, software, games, and video -- valued at over $5,000 -- if you organize and promote a giveaway to your readers. The only strings attached were that the bloggers had to give away the package to a reader, and they had to promote all 31 of the contests, not just their own.

The results were tremendous. Left to their own devices, the bloggers all created interesting and different campaigns (which of course helped their own cause), and generated enormous audience participation:

• More than 50 million impressions across 123 countries, including translations into 40+ languages
• More than 25,000 entries, including more than 10,000 videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere
• Massive traffic increases on the participating blogs
• and, ta da...
• 84% increase in sales of the Dragon

All this for an investment of about $250,000, and zero new marketing materials, advertising, or media buys.

Experimentation won't always generate such great results. That's a given. But you'll never know unless you try.

In thinking about a sober approach to online marketing experimentation, especially for B2B services and solutions, here are a few questions to consider:

• Set time and budget. What about setting aside 5 or 10 percent for experimentation, regardless of what happens to the overall budget? That will ensure you can mostly rely on approaches in which you have most confidence, but still have the discipline to regularly try new approaches that may end up paying off substantially.
• Getting closer to customers. Does the new approach help you get closer to your existing customers and uncover useful insight, develop stronger relationships, and/or identify new opportunities?
• Demonstrating expertise. Are there new ways to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise on critical issues in your market?
  
• Providing value. Does the new approach directly help customer and other influencers with useful content or relationships? Does it provide a new way to test our your service or solution?
  
• Measurement. Can you measure results in useful ways? Can you learn something important, even if immediate sales results don't come through?
• Morale. Are there people on your team or in the organization really excited about the new approach? Especially in a downturn, morale matters! 

Of course, these are pretty important questions to ask about any marketing program or technique, not just the experimental ones. You may just find that it's easier to provide good answers with the new approaches than it is with some of the old.

How big ideas move the market: New research study

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I was joining with The Bloom Group to launch a major study on how to improve the impact of thought leadership marketing in the IT market. I'm please to announce that we have now officially begun to recruit sponsors for the study -- you can see the details and download the prospectus here.

The impetus for the study comes from our concern that marketing in the B2B technology sector too often gets in the way of buyers actually finding what they need to know about new services and solutions. Rather than helping buyers understand the potential value of their offerings, too many technology and IT services companies get caught up in over-hyping their products, talking past the audience, and failing to connect with buyers who are legitimately interested in new approaches to urgent business challenges.

Given the strong possibility of a major slowdown in tech in the coming months, it seems more important than ever that marketers put their energies into programs that connect with recession-wary buyers on the issues that matter most. Simply put, this means programs that make a credible case for technology solutions that helps companies cut costs and generate new revenue.

Our new study will look ahead in part by looking back. We will explore how some of the biggest management concepts of the last 20 years, such as reengineering and customer loyalty management, were developed and marketed in ways that massively fueled the market for new technology, IT services, and management consulting. In fact, corporate investments in technology to support reengineering initiatives played an important role in helping tech companies get out of the recession in the early 1990s.

As important, we will look at what's working and not working right now in marketing some of today's hot button business technology issues, such as unified communications, green IT, service-oriented architecture, and the extended enterprise. If technology companies are to escape the worst of the coming recession, they will need to do a better job showing customers that investments in these types of initiatives are urgently needed as ways to control spending and/or build near-term growth.

Overall, the study is designed to answer some urgent questions facing technology and consulting marketers as they look at a very difficult market in 2009:

• How are big ideas that drive technology markets created, and how do they gain prominence and credibility in ways that drive sales?
• How can technology and IT services companies collaborate more effectively with outside experts to develop, adapt, and promote new ideas that move the market?
• How can technology and IT services companies organize themselves more effectively for thought leadership research and promotion?
• How can marketers work more effectively across their own organizations to maximize sales related to new business ideas?

If you're interested in finding out more, check out the prospectus or let me know