Marketing

What is the cost of a fumbled upgrade?  For J. Crew it was $3MM in unanticipated costs which, according to J. Crew, contributed to their recently announced earnings miss of 4 cents a share.   How did Wall Street respond?  Typical overcorrection seems to be the response with shares trading 15% down in after hour activity.

Ben Worthen highlighted J. Crew’s stumble in his business technology blog in the Wall Street Journal, mentioning that J. Crew isn’t the first company to blame poor earnings results on technology.

There was a wave of businesses blaming poor results on tech-projects-gone-bad in the early part of the decade. We haven’t seen it much lately, though.

One difference: Nike, Hershey and others that had problems in the past went out of their way to blame the tech vendor. J. Crew never once tried to pass the buck. The company didn’t respond to our requests for comment, which also means we don’t know which company sold the offending technology. You can search the Web for “J. Crew” and “systems” and find the names of several companies J. Crew buys software from, but there’s not enough evidence for us to point a finger.

What strikes a chord in me in the report is that Worthen assumes that the poor upgrade is the result of “offending technology.”  Our experience however, leads me to be much more suspicious of the implementation/upgrade approach, executive sponsorship, project budget and timeline constraints, and ultimately the implementation team itself.  All too often we see companies approach an upgrade as a routine activity that can be performed easily by their staff (all while their staff stays on top of their regular day-to-day responsibilities).   Supplemental staff is reluctantly brought in via simple commodity broker staffing firms that can only provide bodies and not real experience from both a people and process standpoint.

Obviously, this doesn’t fly too often.

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Dell, in a brilliant display of PR savvy, has tried to trademark “cloud computing”.  Per The Standard:

After witnessing countless corporate attempts to patent common practices or trademark common terms, and seeing the resulting PR fallout, one would think that companies would just stop trying. Dell, however, seems to think that it should be able to trademark the term “cloud computing,” a phrase that entered the tech lexicon many years ago to describe software processing that takes place on a distributed network, such as the Internet.

This was first noticed by Sam Johnston on Google Groups.  Sam is a member of the cloud computing group.

Here is the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) record of the application.  The status at the time of this post is live.

This is a ridiculous attempt to trademark a colloquialism and obviously should be killed.

In fact, Owen Smigelski, a trademark attorney commenting on on The Standard’s article, explains the trademark’s process and likely fate:

I’m a trademark attorney, and Dell has done more than just “try” to use the trademark. The application was published for opposition, no one lodged any complaints, and now the trademark will proceed to registration (once Dell submits examples of its trademark use). The mark can later be disputed once it is registered by anyone who believes they will be harmed by the registration of the trademark by Dell. Examining Attorneys at the USPTO usually catch phrases that are generally used by the public, thus I am surprised they let this one through with approval.

Here’s a direct link to check the status of the application: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77139082

Eppendorf develops products and systems for use in life-science laboratories worldwide.  By any measure, you’d think this is not the sort of company that would have serious marketing chops.

But you’d be wrong.

For its latest product, Eppendorf spent significant money on a viral video that is doing exactly what it was designed to do — make its rounds via word-of-mouth and the social web.  It’s linked everywhere right now, and this post just adds one more node to the pile.

Here you have a company that sells and messages to a scientific community Purple Cowing something so remarkably well that it’s a perfect illustration of how you can really get a product/company/service name to spread.  It’s cheesy and campy, and that’s what people love about it.  No brochure, web page, or whitepaper could ever cast such a wide net.

I don’t know what epMotion is, but that’s not really the point.  The name is out there en masse.

Just because you work in what’s perceived to be a dry or conservative industry doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun.

I’d like to share with you page 59 of Andy Sernovitz’s excellent book Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, because it’s the page that’s worth the entire price of the book.

Back when I tried to explain what this blog was all about — and by extension, what our company is all about — I did some clumsy skirting of some the concepts I’m about to share below.  Sernovitz perfectly crystallizes my own mindset when it comes to marketing in an age where the old rules no longer apply, and I think this is some of the best advice out there when it comes to honest marketing and brand-building.  So here it is, and if you like what you see here, then I suggest buying and reading the whole book.  It’s fantastic.

There’s a lot of talk about radical transparency and naked conversations and how they are ideas that should fit into a culture and how companies are trying to adopt them as part of their brand strategy.  What many fail to realize is that transparency and honesty are mandatory, not “initiatives’ that show up as PowerPoint bullets in a planning presentation: if you don’t believe in them, or you think you can game the system, you’re wrong.  The conversation is already happening out there, and you can either be part of it or move into isolation.  Eventually, what you decide to do will be talked about by your customers, your employees, your competitors.  So you can join in, have some fun, and maybe learn a thing or two about your customers and how you service them, or you can fear the conversation and be marginalized.  Your choice.

I found this waiting for me in my inbox this morning.  Fun!

Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong.and in charge of the registeration in Asia.We have something important need to confirm with your company.

We received a formal application from a company called “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” applying to register

Internet  trademark:

Miproconsulting

Domain names:
miproconsulting.asia
miproconsulting.biz
miproconsulting.cc
miproconsulting.cn
miproconsulting.com.cn
miproconsulting.com.tw
miproconsulting.hk
miproconsulting.net.cn
miproconsulting.org.cn
miproconsulting.tw

in China and also in Asia on Jun. 23. 2008.

During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” has no trade mark, Intellectual property, nor patent even similar to that word. as an authoritative registration organization, we have the duty to inform you this matter. If you do not know this company,  we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of  sa-lar yun Investment Corp yet, in order to deal with this issue better, please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Hayee
Auditing Department
SK Holdings, Ltd.

This is clever and it took a bit of time to figure out the pathology.  But there is one, and it’s interesting.

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Argh.  I wrote “Web 2.0″ already when I promised myself I wouldn’t do that until at least my 100th post.  Man.  What a letdown.

Anyway.

So Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, has tendered his resignation letter to Yahoo, as has his wife and fellow co-founder Caterina Fake.  Check it out:

Put simply, Yahoo lost focus and Butterfield doesn’t feel he has a place anymore.  The metallurgical storytelling is just clever metaphor.  But that’s not the point.

A great many of our customers are involved in HR/HRIS, so resignations and their accompanying letters are nothing new to them.  But what do you most notice about Butterfield’s parting shot?

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The first order of business, of course, is to explain what this place is and isn’t.  That’s always helpful when it comes to company blogs, because when they’re done right they’re spectacular, but done poorly they lead to nothing but treachery and despair.  So I’d like to get things going on the right foot.

This place is:

• Unfiltered thoughts and musings from MiPro Consulting, some of which will ruminate on our own business, our ideas, our false-starts, our victories.
• Honest conversation.
• Diverse.
• Not boring.
• A genuine conversation platform and place to engage the web community.
• A real blog.

It isn’t:

• A corporate shill-blog.
• Edited and censored by management.
• A brand/culture indoctrination tool.
• Written in the shadows of lawyers.
• Afraid of real feedback, be it “You suck!” or “You guys are fantastic!”
• A fake blog.

It seems an academic exercise to say these things as an opening post, because every other company says the same things.  They believe it on some level, too.  But over time, this transparency thing is hard, because it makes you accountable for what you write and say.  Company blog authors will often go back and make a quick edit to un-ring a bell they rung, but they forget the web has a caches and mirrors and trackbacks and excerpts: the web has a memory.  Over time, though, blogs develop like a person and have a personality.  Real ones have some permanence and fake ones get outed and fall away.

So, here’s to permanence.

Off we go in the spirit of everything I say above.  Glad you’re here.  Come back often, or, if you’re an RSS purist, grab our feed here.

Thanks, and welcome.