Yesterday I wrote about "marketing as media"  in B2B and the challenge of becoming a top source of information and ideas for your customers and prospects. It's critical for all the reasons you know: traditional marketing tactics don't work anymore, your potential buyers are actively looking for new ideas, and you'd better jump into the online conversations happening about your brand because they're going on with or without you. and 2008 was a pretty bad year! Photo credit: back_garage. MORE >>

Years ago, when I was a lowly graduate student at MIT, I learned an essential lesson about communications while taking a course on "framing" the news. The lesson, as my professor Bill Gamson so ably taught, was that he who frames the terms of the discussion is halfway home with a public debate before it even begins.  Politicians understand this the best. They (and their marketing consultants) spend lots of time crafting simple narratives with the goal of framing the debate. Most recently, it was the health care debate with dueling narratives about "government takeovers" and "universal coverage." MORE >>

Michael Shrage’s recent Harvard Business Review post, Great Customers Inspire Great Innovations , got me thinking: Why, amid so much evidence of the power of customer-centric business, are so many companies still mired in inside-out operations? Why do we hear so much talk but see so little action? Shrage’s post reminds us that behind most great innovations lie customers and clients that made those innovations possible. Busicom, a scientific calculator company, for example, commissioned Intel [in 1969] to design a chipset for its new programmable calculators. Am I right to be so critical? MORE >>

Over the last 10 years, more and more B2B firms have invested in account-based marketing: treating individual accounts as "markets" and devising focused campaigns just for them. Back when my partners and I were developing some of the early methodology for account-based marketing in the early 2000s at ITSMA , it was a tough sell. We had seen strong results from ABM pioneers, such as Accenture, IBM, Xerox , and HP, but the costs of doing ABM were clearer to many marketers than the benefits. Much easier to just spam the market with generic emails, webinars, brochures, and the like. MORE >>

Everyone selling high value solutions wants to engage C-level executives.  They're the ultimate decision makers. They They can provide deep insight into both their own companies and emerging issues in your markets. They They can give you the most powerful references and testimonials.  Of course they're also the hardest to reach.  Most B2B solution providers have some sort of executive relationship program, often with some combination of advisory councils, executive briefing centers, executive dinners and seminars, and similar initiatives. CIO Leadership Exchange (200+ CIOs). MORE >>