Can You Innovate In Marketing?

I'm pleased to see that EMC's getting more and more credit for innovation: not only for our technology, but our overall strategy and business model as well.  We're even getting some nice credit for how we've embraced social media as a business tool.

Today, I'm going to take on the relatively sensitive topic of "marketing" in our industry.  And I'm going to openly share with you how EMC is approaching innovation in marketing.

I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not.

Maybe you'll find this interesting, maybe not ... but it's good material for some, and I wanted to share it.  However, if you prefer technology debates, better skip this post!

Why Is Marketing Such A Sensitive Topic In Tech? 

Most of us are technologists.  We tend to have a poor perception of marketing as shallow, content-free and often annoying.  I think that's because there's just so much bad marketing out there, especially in our industry.

However, as Steve Duplessie puts it ...

"Engineering is table stakes – it has to be there.  Sales, I would argue, are equally table stakes. Marketing is the great variable.  Marketing can jack a valuation much faster – and much higher – than any revenue number.  Marketing can cover bad engineering.  Marketing can drive sales – sales rarely drives marketing."

Ouch!  Not exactly how I'd put it -- but we share the same underlying thought: marketing -- when done well -- is far more than buzzwords, nice brochures and spamming you with junk email.

How EMC Looks At Marketing

Simply put, we see marketing in its essence as a way to connect with people, and share ideas. 

Sure, many of those people we'd like to connect with are folks who hopefully would like to buy something, but we have to connect with far more audiences than the proverbial "customers and prospects". 

But all of our conversations shouldn't be all about us, or buying more stuff :-)

This may surprise you, but EMC spends much less on marketing (as a percentage of revenues) than many of our peers.  We do not have big marketing budgets here, friends, despite what you may think.  We are the epitome of lean and mean.

This spending philosophy has evolved an overall approach to marketing where we try to get the maximum impact we can without spending a bunch of money.  Anyone can blow millions of dollars on a slick advertising or branding campaign.  But how do you get the same impact for a fraction of the investment?

Besides, any money saved on marketing can be invested in other areas of the business -- like R+D, or customer support -- stuff that creates real and sustainable customer value.

In another sense, marketing at EMC is pretty easy on many levels.  There's just so much good stuff to go talk about, we really don't have to scratch around for something interesting and worthwhile to talk about.

An Overview

There's a lot that EMC does that I find interesting in the marketing world -- so much, in fact, that we had to come up with some buckets, and focus on just the highlights from 2009.

The 2009 categories I'd like to cover include:

• Innovation In Launches -- a lot of what tech companies do is launch new products and services.

• Innovation In Thought Leadership -- we're not only talking about the ideas themselves, but the mechanisms we use them to engage with people.
   
• Innovation in Social Media -- if you're out on the "interweb", you've probably seen what we're doing in this space.
   
• Innovation in User Experience -- how do we create rich, engaging and valuable experiences that involve more than a white paper or PDF?
   
• Innovation in Employee Engagement -- after all, you're only as good as your employees, and unless they're fully engaged, you're at a strategic disadvantage.

Disclaimer #1: we're not perfect at this stuff, and there's a long list of things I'd like to see us get better at.  There are several companies out there doing innovative marketing stuff that I truly admire.

Disclaimer #2: this is just a small sampling of some of the more interesting bits, and -- despite the length of this post -- is not meant to be exhaustive.  If I covered everything we did here, this post would go on for literally hundreds of pages :-)

Innovation In Launches

So, here's the mission statement.  You've got a Really Big Thing to announce.  You've got to let the whole world know about it as quickly as possible without too much "leaking" ahead of time.  Everyone's going to have their own individual questions and concerns, and you'd like to be responsive.

And, oh by the way, there's not much budget for a big event ...

One thing we're getting better at is the "virtual launch".  If you attended last year's V-Max announcement, you're familiar with what we're doing here.  It was pretty slick.

Although we had some operational difficulties with networking infrastructure due to unexpected heavy interest (a good problem to have), we were able to use a combination of live and pre-recorded multimedia assets to create an industry-wide global launch.

Not only did we think it was pretty good, so did others -- including picking up a few recognition awards for marketing excellence. 

No, that is not an oxymoron ...

Getting an award is always nice, but what we were really pleased with is that we were able to communicate the essence of our story, globally and consistently, do so cost effectively, and do it in such a way that it was easy to consume for our audience.

But not everything you launch is always about specific products -- sometimes there's an over-arching story you want to tell.

A key example of this is EMC's "launch" of FAST -- fully automated storage tiering.  We thought this was a game changer for those of us in the storage biz, and we saw it needing more of a discussion than a discrete event.

This meant that we had to progressively start telling the story ahead of product availability, and use product availability as a "proof point".  It also means you're pretty darn confident of your ability to deliver!

Some may criticize us for talking about something before it's actually available, but -- if you're a customer -- it's important to know that something big is coming so you can plan accordingly.  And, in the grand scheme of things, we believe FAST is pretty big. 

You'll see us doing this same sort of thing with more big topics in the future.

For my third example, I'd like to use launching an alliance partnership.  So many of these tie-ups are nothing more than vague generalities and enthusiastic happy talk, and by comparison there was considerable beef and substance behind the VCE work we had been doing for a while.

Put simply, we thought VCE was a really big deal, not only for us, but for the industry.   Sure, we had three CEOs on stage, new products to describe, a new joint venture, etc.

But there was an important story here behind the hoopla, and it needed to be told.

It needed more than just the usual treatment.  Making matters even more interesting, there were three parties at the table with aligned but slightly disparate vested interests: VMware, Cisco and EMC.

My impression is that we ended up with a world-class event that everyone is still talking about, and many vendors are trying to emulate in some fashion.

It's one thing to describe a vision; it's another thing entirely to make the vision real. 

And that's precisely what we did when we announced a robust set of services for customers who wanted to accelerate their journey to a private cloud model.

From a marketing perspective, services are notoriously difficult to launch and market.

If you think about it, there's no tangible thing to go touch and feel, and when people ask about pricing, you have to be honest and say "it depends". 

However, we're starting to figure out how to effectively communicate this important part of the tech equation.

Occasionally, though, we have to launch an entirely new category.  If you've built something fundamentally new, sometimes you need a new category to describe it.

As an example the category of "enterprise IT management frameworks" is mature and well understood -- but what do you do when you've spent $1B building out a next-gen portfolio?

You create a new category -- and that's precisely what we did when we announced the EMC Ionix portfolio. 

We had to be very clear that virtualization was changing customer requirements, and an entirely new category of capabilities was needed to meet this new need.

EMC is no stranger to this notion of creating new categories, though.  You may remember Centera (introduced the CAS category, or content aware storage) as well as Atmos (introduced the notion of COS, or cloud optimized storage).

Warning: more categories coming in 2010 ...

Innovation In Thought Leadership

I know this term sounds somewhat arrogant to some, but it's an essential part of creating value in a highly competitive and concept-driven market.  IT thrives on new ideas, and we at EMC seem to have more than our fair share.

But it's not enough to come up with an interesting thought; you also have to communicate it in such a way that people can engage with it, and make it their own.  And, of course, you need to back it up with tangible products and services that make the vision real and achievable.

Such was the case during 2009 with EMC (and our VCE partners) promoting the notion of a "private cloud".

If you follow my blog, you'll realize I spent a fair amount of time during 2009 exploring this concept from various angles, culminating with the VCE announcement in November.

We found the discussion so popular that we took a second step, and created a destination site (www.privatecloud.com) where we could broaden the discussion beyond the boundaries of EMC.

The "cloud experts" are still debating terms (that never ends!), but a significant number of IT organizations have embraced not only the term but the strategy, and have started to navigate their IT investment towards fully virtualized environments with operational and consumption models that are more like clouds and less like traditional IT.

A softer version of the same type of thinking can be found in our work to document the size and structure of our growing "information universe". 

You probably remember the "information counter" that we did a while back; we continue to invest in charting this new information-based world we're all just starting to appreciate.

This also provides a rich backdrop for discussing some of the more interesting issues that arise from being inhabitants of this new environment: the growing concerns around privacy, the question of who owns information, the need to preserve our information heritage, the emergence of the "informationist" and more.

Interesting note: this particular meme crossed out of the tech world and into mainstream media -- we had more than a few press mentions in publications like USA Today and the like. 

Key point: really interesting ideas transcend your category.

And then there's the whole "green" thing.

Unlike many companies, we wisely resisted the temptation to "greenwash" EMC when that topic was all the rage a while back. 

Within a normal marketing function, the usual temptation is great to create some green-looking marketing materials to fit in with the new social norm.

Instead, we took far more time and effort by creating a singular internal corporate focus on sustainability that was justifiably impactful and meaningful. 

Once we felt we were doing more than our fair share -- and could justly be held up as one of the leaders -- only then we felt we could communicate what we were doing in a respectful way. 

Again, this was an inside-out effort -- it started with changing EMC on the inside, and then marketing's job was relatively straightforward.

Another example of this thinking can be found in our approach to health care. 

We've long believed that one of the keys to more effective health care is better use of information.  Unfortunately, many health care information systems are fragmented not only internally, but externally as well.

Sure, we see an economic opportunity there.  But there's more -- there's a chance to use all this wonderful information technology to actually improve people's lives, and that's perhaps even more important to us.

As a result, we've invested heavily tp create awareness of the link between better information and better healthcare. 

Too bad that thought has gotten lost in the recent US health care debate :-(

Yet another important example can be found in the category of "employment branding", being known as a really great place to work.  Some companies focused all their efforts on winning one survey or another; EMC took a very different approach to this important topic.

We thought we had a pretty cool place to work, but no one could easily see that from the outside.  So we used our social media tools in a simple and powerful way: to connect the inside of our company to the outside of our company -- in this case, people looking for a cool career. 

Make those connections, and the company will sell itself, so to speak.

If you think about it, companies like EMC compete on talent.  Get the best talent -- gain a competitive advantage.  In that light, things like diversity and inclusion are an essential element of our business strategy in a direct and meaningful way.

Polly Pearson is writing the book, so to speak, on this important area of differentiation in EMC's business strategy.  She's innovating like crazy in this area, and -- yes -- she's part of marketing. 

Not only are we getting kudos for our approach, we're getting serious amounts of world-class talent from around the globe.

It goes without saying that EMC isn't the only source of great ideas and stimulating thinking.  A long time ago, we realized we had a role we could play in capturing and communicating some of the best relevant thinking in our world.

And thus was born EMC's "ON" magazine.

Gil Press has done some amazing work in seeking out and capturing some of the brightest lights in our industry, distilled down and presented well on the pages of this publication. 

The recent "The Web At 20" issue now making the rounds on the internet, and complements a long history of thoughtful editorial effort by Gil and his team that goes far outside the confined walls of EMC Corporation.

Now, if we can only make it an online site with discussion, etc. :-)

Innovation In Social Media

EMC is starting to get the reputation of really "getting it" when it comes to social media proficiency.

This wasn't always the case -- how did we get there?

A key part of our journey was getting proficient "behind the firewall", so to speak.  The idea was simple: if we created an environment where people could interact freely in a safe and supportive environment, we'd eventually have hundreds and thousands of EMC employees who could engage proficiently with the outside world -- blogging, commenting, facebooking and twittering away.

The first major phase of this strategy was EMC|ONE -- an internal social media platform that was involved with a while back. 

To this day, EMC's case study of what we did, how we did it, why we did it, etc. is still considered required reading in many corporate social media circles.

EMC|ONE also played a key role in rapidly evolving our corporate culture away from traditional command-and-control hierarchies and towards open collaborative environments where people felt free to share and comment regardless of where they sat in the organization.

It's hard to be a control freak when everything is out in the open :-)

The next phase of our journey was various effort to connect the inside with the outside.  One of the more significant efforts was EMC's Community Network (ECN) -- basically, a "community of communities" that fed the interests of so many of our external stakeholders.

Whether it's evaluating new tech at the ECN Labs, or conversing with other career professionals at the EMC Proven Professional community -- this marketing investment continues to pay for itself many times over -- simply because it's focused on what our community members want, rather than our own proprietary interests.

No surprise to anyone who's reading this, but EMC has really embraced blogging -- and bloggers.

We have what I believe to be a very progressive corporate policy on blogging, and we heartily encourage people to get out there and share their thoughts.  If it's about EMC's product, services and strategies, so much the better.

We also recognize the value that independent blogging brings to our industry.  One popular example of that was the "Bloggers' Lounge" at EMC World -- best coffee at the show! 

We've started including more bloggers at our traditional press and analyst events.  We've also started to work on better outreach programs for more bloggers.

And, yes, it's true -- we use blogs to find some great talent out there, and hopefully encourage these independent voices to join our EMC team!

There's much more, of course ... how we're using social media to extend the conversation with our customers in ways that we couldn't begin to imagine in the past.

One example of this "old made new" is EMC's Customer Council.  For over a decade, we've invested heavily in bringing some of our best customers together to debate EMC's products and strategy.  As @ianhf points out,

they can be exceptional events for both us and our customers.

But getting together once or twice a year isn't enough these days -- so we've invested in creating a

focused community just to complement the in-person experience we value so much. 

Put differently, we've moved far beyond using social media as just another way to spam people; we think we've begun to crack the code on using these tools and techniques to have far better -- and richer -- conversations than ever before.

And I, for one, am glad to be working at a company that takes this view.

Innovation In User Experiences

Face it -- today's EMC has been largely formed through serial acquisition -- over 40 acquisitions that I can count over the past decade.

This presents an enormous challenge in creating a web presence and a consistent customer engagement model that doesn't look like an assembly of random pieces.

We're not there yet, but we're making progress in some areas.

For example -- there's a successful engineering-led effort to create a common user experience and visual language for all of our software products.  The idea is that the look and feel should be roughly consistent as you move from product to product.  Sounds simple, but -- in reality -- it's a big job.

From a marketing perspective, we wanted to take that same visual language, and bring it to our web properties for technical documentation, customer support and related disciplines.  Why not have consistency between both "user experiences"? 

I'd call that relatively innovative -- albeit rather obvious once you state it!

Another theme is simplifying some of the internal tools EMC uses to make them far more accessible.  Years ago, we started down this road by making all of our powerful eLab interoperability tools accessible from the web, and without special permissions.

As we get into newer areas, we continue to invest in taking subsets of our internal tools, and make them freely available on our website. 

A recent example is EMC's "dedupe calculator".  Make no mistake, this is no gussied-up marketing demo -- it's built on the same tools, algorithms and field data we give to our technical presales people.  Sure, it makes a nice marketing tool, but it's actually a simplified version of the real deal.

Our investments here aren't all for end users, we also invest heavily in our partners' success.

A very popular example from this year is the on-line marketing builder for our EMC Velocity partners.  After all, they're in business to make money too!  

And if you're a technology partner, you often can't put a lot of time and money into doing marketing the way you'd like to.

As a result, we've invested in new tools to make it very easy for our partners to design, implement and manage various customer campaigns, built on pre-existing templates and methodologies.

Hopefully, we'll see more of that being done for VCE going forward into 2010.

One area of "user experience" that's becoming very innovative is one of our big industry shows -- EMC World. 

What could possibly be so innovative about a big, multi-day vendor show? 

It's designed, built and measured 100% on attendee feedback.  The venue, the content topics, the various levels of depth, the entertainment, the agenda, etc. -- all completely data driven by what attendees want, and far less around what we as EMC might want.

Even in a spectacularly bad economy, EMC World 2009 was nothing short of a spectacular success.  99% of the attendees would recommend it to a colleague -- it's that good.  And it complements the separate-but-somewhat-related efforts of RSA, Documentum and VMware.

That sort of "what do people really want?" mantra finds its way in to so much of what EMC is doing these days.  If you give people what they want, they'll be happy, and probably buy something from you as well :-)

Innovation In Employee Engagement

For years, we've believed one of the key roles of marketing is to invest in keeping our employees fully engaged with each other, EMC overall and the community at large.  This is the line of thinking, for example, that led to EMC|ONE as an internal social media platform, in addition to all the usual "corporate communication" stuff that you'd expect.

But we take a broader view these days.

One example that we're all very proud of is the "Working Mother Experience" book that's been so wildly successful.  If you've haven't seen it, it's series of wonderful vignettes of how working mothers do the seemingly impossible to balance different priorities in their lives -- and how EMC is supportive of their priorities.

The book itself is interesting enough.  The story of how it came to be is perhaps even more interesting -- it was a spontaneous effort within the marketing ranks, and wasn't an Official Project. 

No calculated ROI, no mandate -- it just seemed like the right thing to do, and it happened thanks to the efforts of some pretty bright and motivated people.

Now we need to do one on "Working Fathers", although I suspect we have it a bit easier, generally speaking.

As a matter of fact, so much of what we do here in marketing is sort of the same way.  Yes, we get our marching orders like many other corporate functions, but all the really cool stuff is done spontaneously, and -- only much later -- becomes "official". 

That's sort of the way I like it :-)

Another example is our popular "Leadership In Action" series.  In any large organization like EMC, the leaders can seem aloof and unengaged, whereas the opposite is usually true.  To bridge the gap, Polly and her team started using a Flip cam to capture our execs ad-libbing on topics that they felt were important at the moment.

This is not the formal, scripted and over-produced stuff that we're all used to -- these are real people with real passion that want to share their thoughts with everyone else.

And, of course, since we're posting these on our social platform, everyone's free to comment, discuss, etc. as they see fit.  More cool.

And, finally, we're all big fans of giving back to the community.  Sure, at a corporate level we do all sorts of things we think are important -- the money raised for Haiti disaster relief is perhaps the most recent example.

But marketing at EMC has a special local charity -- Cradles to Crayons. 

The need is simple: if you're kid from a family that's having hard times, it can be hard to go to school without the right clothes, accessories, school supplies and the like.  And, if you're the parent of a young child, things like car seats and playpens and toys can be expensive. 

It turns out this is a need that we all can easily fill, and do so in a big way.

We run an internal competition each year as to who which internal team can come up with the most donations.

 And, year after year, they have to send more and more trucks to EMC to pick up all the donations.

Me?  I look forward to it each year.  My kids are older, and -- as a result -- we've always got tons of great stuff that could really help someone else out in some small way.

So There You Have It ...

As a marketing organization, we do tons of the traditional stuff you'd expect in any large organization: lead generation, messaging, market segmentation, collateral production, strategy, campaigns, etc. etc.

That's the stuff that's just table stakes, in my book.  What makes EMC special in this regard is that we're expected to innovate, to try new things, to go outside of what's usually expected in our industry.  Not all of it always works, but a lot of it does.

Fortunately, we can act simply as a lens on what this fantastic organization is doing, and what our customers and stakeholders are doing as well.

In some sense, that makes marketing far easier -- doesn't it?

Comments

[Alex]

Chuck,
What platform did your team use for EMC|ONE? Third-party or home-grown?

Thank you,
Alex

[Chuck Hollis]

Alex -- simple answer, we used Jive's Clearspace -- a controversial but ultimately correct decision.

I wrote an entire blog about the journey -- start to end -- here: http://chucksblog.emc.com/a_journey_in_social_media/

Also popular is the white paper summary, which can be found here: http://chucksblog.emc.com/a_journey_in_social_media/2008/12/giving-back-and-a-request-for-help.html

Hope this helps ...