NetSuite's Fred Studer on setting fires to tell stories around
- Summary:
- Cavemen round fires told stories to one another. Flash forward to the cloud age, and the basic principle is the same for marketing, says NetSuite CMO Fred Studer.
Before we walked upright, we’d sit in caves around the fire and tell stories. My job as a marketer now is to set the fires that we can all sit around.
That’s one of the ideas underpinning the philosophy of Fred Studer, the recently appointed CMO at NetSuite, who wants to see some radical rethinking of the way that tech firms approach marketing.
Studer explains:
There is a big difference between what we have called pre-cloud marketing and now cloud marketing. We used to call it traditional marketing, now it’s modern marketing. At some point, modern marketing will become traditional marketing and there will be something new.
Studer defines his vision as being beyond adaptive marketing. His argument is that traditional marketing has what he calls a “classic flaw” in the inherent implication that it’s all about trying to make something look better than it is. What’s needed, he suggests, is a total transformation of approach:
On-premise products are like old car manufacturers. The car manufacturer would think about a prototype, then do a first version, then test that, then put it onto the manufacturing floor and finally, after about four or five years, it would be put into production.
So it’s technically five years old, but it’s sold as the 2015 model. The point is that the technology is already old when it gets to the users and so the marketing is also old.
It’s the same for software. There was so much coding going on for five years and all the marketers did was get ready to write and do big launches. Then the work would really start. What is the benefit? Why should I switch off the old stuff?
What the software world did was really like a car manufacturer saying ‘here’s a new car, now drive backwards’. People had to relearn how to drive the car and that shifted the user experiences all the time. It didn’t give marketing the authority to go to market in a true way.
The new model of marketing in the cloud era is about getting aligned with the customer, Studer posits:
With cloud, we do a new release every quarter or at least every half year. Those classic big launches don’t happen. People who work in cloud don’t work in that classic style.
Nowadays you need an audience marketing team, aligned to specific audiences, customers and industries. You need them to know how the service is delivered and what is its value to the audience. You may not know every single feature and function, but you know the conversations that show your technology or service or product has delivered on its promise.
So you align your marketing that way. You’re marketing through the customer rather than to the customer. That way you get a customer marketing program that is more like a customer advocacy program.
Holy grail
Customer advocacy is of course one of the holy grails in the social media age, but getting customers into a place and a mindset where they will participate in this in something like a planned manner, requires as much of a culture shift on the buy side as the sell side. Studer says:
The revolution is not in marketing; the revolution is from the customer side. There is no more selling cycle. Customers don’t want to get in a selling funnel. They’re 70% of the way down through the sales cycle before they even want contact with the company. It’s a shift from a selling cycle to a buying cycle.
I’m only going to get customer consideration of my website if I have compelling content on it. Our decision cycles are significantly different. Our trust cycles are different. We used to talk to friends and colleagues when we were making a decision. Now we go online and we can consult millions of touchpoints. We look at who is in our trust network. Real time trust analytics is no longer a gut feel thing.
Let’s think of a buying and consideration cycle, an organic and ongoing process. We have to think about individual decisions and think about those as a cycle that will touch other cycles. The customer then gets the engagement they way that they want. The whole goal of the company is to make sure that they get the brand promise you’ve committed to.
All of which brings us back to the cavemen round the fire:
To that end, Studer has overseen some changes at NetSuite in order to eat the proverbial dog food:Before we walked upright, we’d sit in caves around the fire and tell stories. People would then add to those stories. People tell other people stories that they are a part of. If we can get customers involved in the successes and engaged with them, then they will tell stories. My job as a marketer now is to set the fire that we can all sit around.
We’ve re-orgnanized the team to be customer advocacy focused. How can we make sure that we help customers to get the brand value we promise? How do we orchestrate people telling that story and telling it in their unique way?
We’ve doubled down on the number of customer-facing marketers that we have and brought in people who are very effective story-tellers. We need people who can galvanise and catalyse stories, story creators who go and assist the customers to get value and describe that value in their terms.
Coming up in May will be a major test-case for Studer’s philosophy as NetSuite hosts its annual SuiteWorld conference in San Jose at which every delegate will be given a Fitbit and essentially participate in a community event:
The demonstration of the value of a Fitbit is when the community comes together around something as simple as walking. We’ll have 6 teams of people and we will measure the number of steps they take. That will define the value of a donation to charities NetSuite supports. So we can tell that story.
My true delight would be that people go back to their homes and see their Fitbits, then tell people that they got them at a conference for a little company call NetSuite and they helped them to see some value.
SuiteWorld is the fire set for customers to come and tell customers customers stories.
My take
An interesting take on the need for tech marketing to change in an age of cloud and one that brings its own challenges. It will be interesting to see how the NetSuite faithful react at SuiteWorld.
Disclosure - at time of writing, NetSuite is a premier partner of diginomica.