Fred Hoar and the timeless lessons of success in Silicon Valley

© Gkanivets

 

Hard to believe it’s been nine years and a few months since Fred Hoar died. 

For newbies in the tech biz, during the formative years of Silicon Valley Fred was the dean of All Things Marketing.  The Toastmaster of High-Tech. And he wore this mantle like a suit of shining armor almost from the time he migrated here during the Vietnam ’60s to be the voice of Fairchild Semiconductor, the seminal force in just about All Things Silicon.  Prior to this he’d worked in mid-town Manhattan during the Mad Men ’50s and early ’60s, applying advertising and PR to RCA (that’s the Radio Corporation of America, for you Millennials — um, look it up) overlooking Rock Center.

I had the honor of delivering remarks at his memorial service, to an SRO crowd in a large church in Palo Alto on a sunny but sad winter’s afternoon.  While the end had not come suddenly, the kick-in-gut news was still a shock, especially for the many of us who’d worked for him at one of his many stops along a glittering career path in Santa Clara County, from Fairchild’s tilt-up in Mountain View to his lectern at Santa Clara University where he regaled eager graduate students right to the end.

Another tribute to his force-of-nature personality and charm: how often so many of us recall his homilies and observations. And what more could a teacher/mentor hope for than to have his apprentices so fondly remember the advice, insights and admonitions of the Master?

Thought of him again recently at this year’s RSA show.  Fred liked these bustling events and made no bones about it, unlike many of us who pretend to dread them even as we sign off on the purchase orders that seem to grow chubbier every year, in any economy. Sometimes I think everything I learned about how to survive and prosper in the Valley I absorbed from my Apple years under Fred — and listening to him for years thereafter.  And what I’m reminded of at an event like RSA, is that that the more things change in this business the more they stay the same. Of course, the techniques of “global communications” may be radically different than Fred’s day — the prominence of social marketing comes quickly to mind — but the basics of value propositions and holding peoples’ interest remain the same. The most obvious differences are superficial: people don’t line up for phones anymore they continually stare into the ones in their hands. Far fewer coats and ties, way more denim. And women’s fashion has, thankfully, lost the shoulder pads. The booths are sleeker and convey more at-a-glance information (necessary for the ADD that’s a universal in business today).  But those marketers who rise above the pack still practice what Fred preached: keep it simple, memorable and worth peoples’ time.  No one was ever bored into buying anything. People never pay real attention to “marketing”, they’ll always pay attention to “interesting”.  Thanks, Freddy.

 

When he’s not ranting on this site, Stan DeVaughn holds forth along with comrade-in-communication Peter Davé on The Write Stuff, the blog of Silicon Valley’s premiere technology content-creation agency Write Angle, where IT vendors go for written content that drives revenue.

How to Make Your Product Stories Become the Stuff of Hollywood Scripts

© Oxlock

 

We read this analysis of “storytelling” recently and were struck by the similarities to the principles that can elevate marketing content from good to really good, or even great. Yes, we’re talking about the guidelines of Hollywood screenwriters.

Before you scoff, consider that your users and customers do not read your website. At least, not necessarily.  Neither do they devour your PDFs.  In fact, they steer clear of anybody’s “marketing content”.  However, they DO read what piques and holds their interest. And this is exactly what great storytelling is and does.  See if you don’t agree how something like a case study or a customer use-case is a close cousin to a great script:

Heroes: They draw an audience like a magnet.  Especially if the “hero” is a character with whom people can relate and identify.  If it’s an underdog fighting the odds, so much the better.  Maybe a beleaguered security professional making tradeoffs between network productivity — and the possibility of compromised data.  IT folks can certainly relate to this.

Antagonist: In a security case you’d call them the bad guys but “they” can also be an abstract. Like the “before” in a before-and-after set of “before” circumstances.  An example would be the conditions that existed in a company where employees are not free to utilize their own smartphones and tablets securely.  In such cases, mobility is a myth. And productivity suffers. Or, in a different sense, there is Apple vs. Microsoft where, in Apple’s messages, we can always count on Windows, or Android, being cast as the straw man or whipping boy.

Big Moment:  AKA, the “aha” that’s the hero’s awakening to what must be done to resolve the conflict, or rectify the wrong, of the situation at hand. “What we need is an app that enables our employees to bring their own devices and stay secure and productive while they access company data wherever they roam!”

Transformation: Now comes the commercial message.  The hero wields your product or service like Luke Skywalker’s Light Saber, overcoming the problem and the odds. Mission accomplished.

Does your content attract and hold the audience you’re looking for today?  Can it work harder? How can you transform your brand’s story into a nonstop page-turner?  Do you see opportunities for your existing product line or new offerings to be dramatized in compelling stories and cases?

 

(When he’s not posting on this blog, Stan DeVaughn sees to it that technology companies place priority on customer value in their marketing content and communications.  You can also read him at The Write Stuff, the blog of technology writing service Write Angle.)

 

Betting the farm on new products is in the best tradition of technology and Silicon Valley

Intel bet all its chips on the microprocessor business.  In hindsight, it was brilliant.

This was an instructive piece about the present, past and future of technology products.  Indeed, it addressed the whole innovation ethos of Silicon Valley.  Technology has hastened the tempo of change but there is nothing new about the way today’s tech king-pins can so quickly find themselves looking up at the new king-pin.

As part of this constant change, it’s long been a given that you must cannibalize products in order to sustain yourself into the technological future.  Likewise, you must be ready to roll the dice on some dicey propositions when it comes to markets and technologies. At least three of today’s tech titans, who remain hands-down leaders, made bet-the-farm decisions in their respective histories when it became apparent that staying the course would lead them right off a cliff.  This is apparent in retrospect only, however.  At decision time, you don’t have the luxury of hindsight.

Apple: The move into entertainment, in retrospect, seems logical.  The iPod is a computer after all.  As is the smartphone.  But this was still a ballsy move.  Might not seem like it today. But it was. Result: Apple in 2012 is a consumer technology brand, and all that this implies.  But to get here, from there, was hardly the slam-dunk it might seem.

IBM: In 1964, when Big Blue owned the business market for big, honkin’ mainframes, a smaller machine was a radical departure.  This was the year it introduced the revolutionary System/360, the first large “family” of computers to use interchangeable software and peripheral equipment. This concept was a huge step away from the status quo.  And IBM was not known for radical departures. At the time, Fortune magazine called  it a “five-billion-dollar gamble”. There was no guarantee that computer compatibility, a concept now taken for granted, was the wave of the future. If the S/360 failed, IBM’s existing computer product line would be quickly overtaken by competitors. To succeed, IBM would have to cannibalize existing, revenue-producing computer product lines and migrate customers from their current IBM systems to a wholly new, unproven product. Both scenarios were fraught with risk. When IBM committed to developing the System/360, it was bet-the-company time.  The rest is history.

Intel:   In the early 1980s its business was dominated by dynamic random access (DRAM) chips.  By then, however, increased competition from semiconductor manufacturers in Japan had begun to cut into the profitability of this market.  It was time for a bet-the-company shift, which is exactly what CEO Andy Grove did.  Intel bet all its chips, so to speak, on the microprocessor business. This also fundamentally changed the company’s business model.  By decade’s end, the bet was paying off.  Supplying IBM and its competitors with microprocessors, the engines of personal computers AKA “Intel Inside”, the company would begin a ten-year run of unprecedented growth.   But it was never a “gimme”.

Steve Jobs’ failure to connect his own dots is everybody’s loss

In the end, it was a matter of faith. One that was sadly misguided. Revelations in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is full of more irony than even Shakespeare could have penned.  Jobs, the perfectionist, opts out of medical best-practices to deal with what appeared to be a treatable cancer. Instead, as critical months pass, he relies on diet and visits a psychic.  Jobs, the street-smart business practitioner and fierce boardroom player, chooses “magical thinking” over the medical data. Never a man of faith, he adopts a kind of faith-healing as the cancer progresses and, ultimately, consumes him.

He can be excused for reliance on his instinct. It served him well in life. Indeed, it served all of us.

I only know what Isaacson has written about this and what’s been reported.  And the only thing I know about cancer is the one I’ve had to deal with.  Still, the the ironies are mind-boggling.  Like his claim that his uncommon insights were the result of his experience in having “more dots to connect” — and then failing to connect the most crucial ones when it came to his health. The force-of-nature personality that propelled him to so much triumph turned out to contain the seeds of his own demise: his reliance on a ferocious will that would betray him when he was most vulnerable.  A vulnerable Steve Jobs? Not only ironic but oxymoronic.  We could have used more of that force and more of those triumphs.  It was my privilege–not always pleasant but never boring–to have worked for him in the early days.  Never thought I would say this, but, he will be sorely missed.

How to tell a good story when you talk about yourself

Are you telling a good story on your About Us page?

Phil Roybal (not pictured here) was a great storyteller in the early days of Apple. I remember him taking the stage, or the podium, microphone in hand (this was before the days of headsets with the little wire mic now favored by speakers, for good reason), and spinning the story of how Apple came into being, succeeded, ran into some trouble, overcame it, and made a success.  He liked to walk around while he was doing his thing.  But unlike some speakers he got away with it because you paid attention to what he was saying, not doing. Didn’t make much difference who his audience was — employees, dealers, customers, schoolkids, or the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce.  He went with the same basic shtick and it enthralled the audience.  When he finished, the crowd knew something it hadn’t known and felt good about the fact that Apple existed.  Phil also left behind a favorable impression of Apple products, which was the whole purpose. “Everybody loves a good story,” he would say.  Indeed.

I was reminded of this earlier today when I saw a blog post by author Brian Tracy, courtesy of HubSpot, sharing tips on how to make your “About Us” page more meaningful.  How to do better business storytelling.  Turns out that good business storytelling is whole lot like good storytelling of any kind.  Phil knew this and his audiences appreciated it.

With apologies to Tracy, here is my take on the best practices I’ve seen along the way since my, and Phil’s, Apple days:

1.  Listeners (or readers) want to know the story from the beginning.  What happened?  Who were the characters?  What were they trying to do or solve and what were they up against in their mission?

2.  Conflict creates the drama that creates the interest that keeps people from falling asleep.  Did your founders flounder for a while?  What were the obstacles they overcame?  How?  Did they succeed against all odds?

3.  Readers and listeners want resolution.  Not that they want everything brought to a tidy conclusion, but they want a sense for where you took them and how it speaks back to the beginning.  Think of being atop a mountain and looking back down where your started. If your story can delight them by arriving at an unpredictable juncture in the final chapter, so much the better.

Like all good yarns: a beginning, a middle and and end.  In other words, founder(s) who embarked on a journey on which they overcame obstacles and achieved something worthy of acclaim.  And pride of belonging. A story worth telling and hearing.

Every company, like every employee in it, has a story.  What’s yours?  What is it about your business story–About the Company– that is worth reading or hearing?  How can you make it more story-like?

The right questions to ask a market long before you go to market

Ask the right questions, get the right answers, build the right product.  Easy, right?

In journalism and in police work, the five Ws — who, what, when, where and why — amount to the framework of investigation and the building blocks of a story or case.  In marketing, the same Ws apply.  But the order is slightly different.  The first question to ask: Why?  Why are we engaged in this effort in the first place?  If the reason is valid, you then gather the data you need to answer the second question: Who, as in who is the target of this effort?  That determined, you now have some notion about what it will take to get this target to act.  Only then can you determine the where and when of the “what” it is you’re up to.

Just remember that this is an exercise all about asking the right questions. Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer.  Get the wrong answer(s) and you mobilize the wrong effort (read: waste a lot of money).

This is one of the great problems of today’s Internet-driven, DIY world.  There are countless amateur pollsters and market researchers crawling all over the Web today.  They work hard, they are resourceful, they are astute and, more often than not, they are gathering garbage.  As in garbage in, garbage out.

The wrong questions do not yield useful information.  Ask any cop.   The secret sauce is in the right question(s).  As BrandSavant (AKA Tom Webster) says, “The really great questions…are the ones that reveal what (users, customers) want, need and desire without them having to articulate what they want, need and desire”.

Would an iPod, an iPhone or an iPad have been developed if Apple had merely asked focus groups what they wanted in music, telecommunication or mobile computing?  The apocryphal story here is the one about Henry Ford saying that before the automobile was a reality, people told him what they really wanted in transportation was faster horses.  Here’s Webster again:

“No one is passionate about a product they haven’t seen yet. The art and skill of the research professional is to ask the questions that can root out that passion without placing a cognitive burden on the respondent, or requiring them to do your jobs as marketers.

“In market research, as in computer science and cooking, one law remains true: garbage in, garbage out. I earn my keep asking questions. I’m humbled and grateful when people ask me to help analyze their data, but the truth is – you asked me too late”.

When to ignore conventional wisdom in business

Eschew the glam on Product Launch Day. (Opt for Levi’s and a black mock-turtle?)

You have to hand it to Apple.  Again and again.  I can’t think of another company whose product intros can consistently wow far more people than they disappoint, especially when the company in question is such an uber-profile vendor with an iconic, rock-star CEO.  And when the intros are built up for weeks, even months, like over-hyped movies.  Remember, though: Apple has a built-in advantage here.

OK, so how do they do it?  More important, can you replicate it?  Yes, but only if you’re comfortable doing business the Apple way. For starters, Apple doesn’t stress over conventional wisdom.  Its users don’t give a flying mousepad about “open systems”.  They like closed ones. The point here is that Apple markets and sells to its tribe, first and foremost, that legion of cult followers built and cultivated over many years, the way Jerry Garcia played piper (pun not intended) to Deadheads .  Apple has a rabid cheering section that would fill Jerry Jones’ new stadium in Texas to overflowing and that makes fans you see at an NFL or NHL game seem casual by comparison.   Next, don’t bet the ranch the day you launch. Don’t be deluded that a big spike in hits will convert into sales and instant market leadership. Please your hardcore fan base first and foremost.

Your true north is to stay mindful of the things a company, brand, or product does that impress you.  Go out there and do those kinds of things yourself.  You always know when a company is talking to you, not at you. How? It’s whenever you listen and pay attention as a result.  Nearly 30 years ago, Steve Jobs was obsessed by the things Sony and Mercedes did with their products and marketing to create their cult-like followings.  Take a close look at Apple.  You’ll see the resemblance today.

What iPad will and won’t do

Watched Walt Mossberg describe the iPad in favorable, but measured, terms today a few hours after I read a favorable but calm review in in the SF Chron. There’s no doubt that the “pad” platform delivers a useful new way of consuming the ‘net.  Still, I’m left wondering about the arrival of the tipping point.  When will the new, new thing arrive that will have an irresistible value proposition for those of us who don’t stand in line outside Apple Stores?  What will that tablet have to contain that will obsolete our laptops the way laptops liberated us from one-location desktops?  Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like it’s there yet.  But the stake-in-the-ground surely is.

Finding a brand consultant and brand identity

And if you believe in the Easter Bunny, you’re sure to find a ready-made brand strategy that will fit a company just like yours.

First thing you do?  Stop your external search.  Look in the mirror.  It’s right there.

Ever since I heard about (and then read) All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin several years ago, I’ve been convinced that as time passes and collective memory fades, everything old is new again in business — especially in marketing.  He beats on the same drum in his post here. Good stuff, as always.

Good marketing has always been about creating word of mouth, stories, and legend.  Today, with so many people able to spread word of mouth so quickly and easily, it’s more powerful than ever.  Exponentially.  Companies with the marketing gene, like Apple, have always known this and are always exploiting it their best advantage.

Just as every generation assumes that it invented sex, each wave of new marketing people want to believe that an “identity” is something you go out and buy and put on like a trendy new pair of shoes.   They soon discover that their brand is not their shoes.  It’s their feet.  It’s not the belt, it’s the waistline.  It’s not what you put on your head, it’s what’s inside of it.  A value proposition isn’t a pitch, it’s the information you present that’s relevant and compelling to a buyer. Cosmetics don’t conceal the real deal.  A brand, like character, stands for something.  It can never stand for everything. If you try to make it do this, it will stand for nothing.  This is part of reason why great, visionary leadership is so rare.  There’s a natural inclination of the heart to be liked.  To be everybody’s everything so as not to offend or alienate any one of them.  It’s a losing battle so stop fighting it.  You stand for something…or nothing at all.   Same as it ever was.

It’s Apple’s Tablet but you’d think it was coming from Moses

The guy’s amazing.  Just freakin’ amazing.  Every year, same thing.  Same buzz that builds to a deafening roar.  Same anticipation. Same spontaneous-combustion hype.  Don’t get me wrong.  When Steve Jobs is no longer part of the tech scene there will a void out there like a black hole. May he live long and be part of the landscape for at least as long as I’m around.  Otherwise, what/who is there?  Marc Benioff? Carol Bartz?  Eric Schmidt?  The Twitter dudes?  Not exactly the same league.  I love Apple.  The value prop, the hype, the joie de geeq.  They get it right.