Interview with:Jeff Cotrupe: MarketPOWER™, LLC [jeffcotrupe]
MARKETING
 | Up till now, what has been your professional career path? I have worked with some truly great people and amassed an unbeatable combination of experience and proven results in product management, interactive/digital marketing, research & analysis, strategy, public relations and design. |
| Please list web addresses where one can see something about you. |
| What is your stance as a marketing professional? What are you good at? What differentiates you from others? Product management, interactive/digital marketing, research & analysis, strategy, public relations, design | I've helped organizations generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, acquisitions and venture capital | Former practice leader at #1 technology research firm Gartner (nyse: IT) and strategic marketing director at ADC (nasdaq: ADCT). Auburn University graduate who also holds radio telecommunications license with broadcast endorsement from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and advanced agency certification from Young & Rubicam. |
| A marketing strategy begins with an idea. How are yours born? I start with the results we need and work from there. I specialize in getting down to business quickly, but if I have more than one day to complete a project, usually the day after I first learn of the business need I awaken the very next morning with much of it already written in my head. |
| In which market, products or services, are you currently working? • Software
• Wireless and wireline telecommunications
• Cable broadband
• Next-gen/IP services
• Multimedia content delivery
• Networking
• Electronics
• Automotive
• Hospitality |
| Did this product exist ten years ago? And the brand? I launched MarketPOWER, LLC in 2003 and began seriously branding it in 2005. Some of the services I offer existed 10 years ago, but no one has ever offered all of them under one roof backed by the proven results I bring to the table. Those services include:
• Research
• Marketing
• Products (management, marketing, launches, naming, trademarking, pricing, positioning, case studies, ROI)
• Strategy
• Design
• Web 2.0
• PR 2.0 |
| What is the consumer or user like that you have to win over? • Chief marketing officer (CMO) | Strategic planning
• Sales/Business development | Alliances
• Market research & analysis | Competitive intelligence
• Product management/marketing | Brand management
• Webmaster/developer | eMarketing | e(m)Commerce
• Public relations/Corporate affairs
• Marketing | Event management
• R&D | QA/QC | CRM | Revenue assurance
• Service/Application development and provisioning |
| What is the key to gaining consumer fidelity? Are you marketing it? Then enthusiastically sell it, support it and continue to enhance it. Don't be one of the myriad of companies (or individuals) who "offer" 10 different products/services...but after you interact with them you learn they really only want to sell you two. Or just ONE. Be available. Be responsive. Be honest. Never let your people, and I mean everyone down to the lowest-paid employee or contractor, forget the connection between the consumer and his or her paycheck. |
| How do you determine what consumers think and feel? Is something more than qualitative research necessary? The research you must do first to establish the existence and size of any consumer or business market is QUANTitative. Having done that, you can then do qualitative research & analysis to learn what your target consumers (or businesses) think and feel. Next you must determine whether you already have in-house what it will take to meet the needs of that market--because, remember, even if these are your current customers, the market is always moving--and assess whether you can develop/evolve or otherwise work with what you have to meet this moving market demand. If the answers are no, all is not necessarily lost; you may be able to partner with a company that has what you lack and in the process either tap a new market or retain your share of the market. |
| What type of communication are you utilizing? Every form of communication I can effectively deploy. Today much of it revolves around Web 2.0 and PR 2.0. Here is the core concept: No matter how many advanced techniques we deploy, our Holy Grail is to transform ourselves from the old "push" marketing model to "pull" marketing. To build business and social connectivity with everyone we need to reach in all the right venues, at the right moments, with the right messaging so they never feel as if they are being "marketed to" (or at).
I am active on Twitter, have my own online newsroom, News 2.0, and blog, MarketBLOG, and am a frequent contributor to the two major industry blogs where I was invited to contribute: The #1 blog in the communications software marketplace, B/OSS Insider, and an up-and-coming blog in the Web 2.0 arena, SEO Shootout. I am beginning to get a foothold in the social media revolution and am creating as much synergy (and frankly, as many backlinks) as I can, for myself and my clients, on as many bookmark/share sites and directories as possible. Some ways I enhance my social media presence include:
• Deploying the Add To Any and ShareTHIS superwidgets on my site to provide site visitors with one-click access to a multitude of share/save sites, all cued up to save/share your site, entry or other link.
• Using WordPress for everything except my core site (and that may change) to leverage its great features in presenting my news and blog content to the world.
• Using FeedBurner to rocket that news and blog content to the far corners of the Internet and format the content so it's readily-accessible to all readers (both the human kind and the web feed reader apps, like Google Reader and NewsGator, that present the feeds to them). |
| Who/what is your competition? Not too many competitors, really: Just every market research & analysis firm, ad agency, and marketing, web content/design and public relations firm on the planet. =;-D |
| What differentiates your product/service from the competition? It is difficult for most competitors to point to a track record of having launched more than 15 products and services that have helped organizations across various industries generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, acquisitions and venture capital. I consider my lineup of services the raw material on which the business is built and these intangibles are what close the deal:
WORLD-CLASS PERFORMANCE AND CREDIBILITY.
> When a well-known research firm backed out on a commitment--a week before the due date--a major media organization suddenly had a problem: How to deliver a sizable multi-part project for one of the world's technology giants. One call to MarketPOWER: Problem solved. Original project timeframe was four weeks; we completed everything in four days.
> After hearing us speak on a recent webcast, the CEO of a company on the call sent us a note that read: "Great job! Refreshing to hear people who know what they are talking about."
SENIOR HANDS ON YOUR PROJECT FROM START TO FINISH.
Unlike some firms who trot out the big guns to win your project, then quietly farm it out to a junior analyst or lowball contractor, when you choose MarketPOWER this is who works on your project: Jeff Cotrupe and a carefully selected list of marquee names in the industry. Experts you know and trust who bring the knowledge and focus your projects deserve.
STRAIGHTFORWARD PRICING.
Clients engage our services at a competitive monthly retainer or at attractive project rates based on type, scope and timeframe. We'll even take your budget/comfort figure as a starting point and build a project to match.
BLUE-CHIP INDUSTRY REFERENCES.
Upon request we will provide pages of top professionals across many industries and several world regions who can speak knowledgeably about MarketPOWER and Jeff Cotrupe. |
| How do you value the results obtained up to now? My site's Customers/Partners page features an amazing lineup of companies I have been fortunate enough to serve and work with over the years, including:
• HCL Technologies, a leading global IT services company that is also the largest computer manufacturer in India.
• IBM
• Platformic, which empowers broadcast media companies with a powerful, intuitive web application suite plus hosting, development and managed services.
• TechTarget/SearchTelecom, one of the largest, most active online communities in the telecommunications industry.
• The TM Forum, the de facto industry association for the global communications software industry.
Along the way I've launched the world's first ASP-hosted software solution in the communications market; helped the #4 communications service provider leapfrog AT&T; put a 10-year old "stealth company" on the map in its markets, raise its annual revenues from $10M to $25M, then be acquired for $185.5M; launched a vertical markets approach that helped a company win contracts with Comcast and the DoD; helped a Silicon Valley firm win $20M in investment funding; and helped one of the world's largest IT outsourcers position itself as the premier provider of "green" IT and data center migration solutions. |
| What is a better way to communicate your product: emotional or rational? I view my role as a communicator in the mode of the Patrick Swayze character in the movie Ghost who (in movie suspension-of-reality) learned to make things move in the physical world although he had crossed over to the spiritual one and was no longer physically there. I must make my communications leap off the page, off the screen and/or out of the speakers and make you happy, sad, excited, angry and, ultimately, to buy something or take some other action (in web speak: achieve a "conversion").
In everything I present to the world in any venue or context I try to connect with everyone on both levels, rational and emotional. It helps if you are highly aware, as I am, of some of the key psychographic triggers:
• Sight, sound or touch? Giveaway phrases include “Sounds good,” “I see what you mean,” and “We need to get our hands around this.”
• Good works or words of affirmation?
• Risk-taker/thrill-seeker or trouble-avoider?
Yet in the final analysis it comes down to what some contend are the only true motivators in this world: Pleasure or pain. You must provide the ROI and/or opportunity cost factors to persuade prospects that if they purchase/lease/access your product they will experience pleasure...and if they do not, they will feel the pain. When a million corporate talking heads say the phrase "pain points" each and every business day, this is what they mean. |
| What's your answer to the typical question: does marketing create nonexistent needs? I won't pretend to know the answer to this one with absolute certainty any more than I would "Which came first, the chicken or the egg." I will say that in order to hatch the kinds of results your company or client is looking for, you must approach every marketing challenge as if you are doing exactly that, creating a non-existent need. That frames your mind properly for the challenge in the same way that in baseball, softball, cricket or any other sport involving pitching, the best advice to the pitcher (or bowler) is to "Throw the ball THROUGH the plate/wicket, not at it." Intensity is key if you are ever going to unlock the hidden needs your prospects may not even know they have yet...or more realistically day-to-day, if they already know they are in the market for X or Y and you must persuade them to purchase X or Y from you instead of three, 10 or 40 other competitors. |
| In times of crisis sales of generic store brands rise. What should premium brands do or not do when faced with this? First get out quickly with messaging that reminds the market of the exact standards or specifications by which your brand achieves a higher level of quality. Then show them that you are not marketing from the ivory tower and either unaware of (or "above") the crisis by introducing--to substantial but tasteful fanfare--special savings promotions and/or pricing that still provides essential margin but shows the market you are right in the thick of it with them and will help them as they scramble to cut costs without sacrificing quality. Third, introduce your own generic, low-cost brand at substantially lower cost to compete with the low-price leaders. Several of the leading beer manufacturers have successfully done this, creating so-called microbrew beers at a lower price point and the only way consumers discover the beer emanates from the same source is to read the fine print on the bottle. (At which point the beer manufacturers may be at an advantage depending on how many microbrews the consumer has ingested before attempting to read that fine print.) |
| Can you cite brands or well-known products that you admire for marketing brilliance? • APPLE. I was delighted to find the "Mac vs. PC" television spots featured on the home page of the Apple website early in that campaign, and although they are not still on the home page, it is possible to link to the spots from there. That inspired me to pull together the full-page ads I had created for MarketPOWER, create several more, and place all of them on the home page. Not only does that give prospects another way to quickly learn about us in an all-in-one format separately from the site itself, it also lends a certain cachet that says, "This company is large enough to have an advertising campaign." Our firm is quite small, but this along with the way we present everything on the site must be positioning us as a larger entity because we field a semi-regular flow of messages via our site contact form from people asking to be part of our "employee training/internship program."
• EDS. This IT systems integrator and outsourcer, the brainchild of "I briefly led the U.S. presidential polls as an Independent" Ross Perot, launched a television spot during one of the Super Bowl broadcasts based on a business phrase that was all the rage at that time: "It's like herding cats." The spot showed horseback herders attempting to literally herd thousands of CGI-generated (or -edited) cats and in the process knocked that bit of vastly-overused business-speak, ahem, off its high horse. Just as importantly, the ad did something too many others do not: When it was over I remembered not just the creative spot but WHO it was for.
• FINELIGHT. A small firm you've never heard of has one of the most interesting, entertaining sites I've ever seen. Finelight, www.finelight.com, a small agency in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, with an unspectacular client list clustered in the medical and transportation sectors, hits you with visual images, sophisticated effects, music and in selected sections, employee voice-overs. Many others try to mine a similar vein and wind up looking cute or cloying or trying-too-hard. Finelight looks like the smartest kid in the room. When you contact Finelight by phone, its on-hold and between-callers music matches the site.
• VERIZON...SORT OF. Everyone seems enchanted by the Verizon "Can you hear me now" television spots. I see it differently: I've told more than one packed room around the TV during major sporting or other events, "What they don't tell you is that's not a Verizon tester; that's a Verizon CUSTOMER." |
| The consumer is king: have advertisers realised this yet? Advertisers (or at least the characters in advertisements) realized this at the dawn of the age of advertising. The ones who have not always realized it are the companies themselves in conducting their day-to-day business. The charter member in this HALL OF SHAME: SOUTHWEST AIRLINES, which continues to spend untold millions hammering us all over the head for years with its "No Change Fees" mantra...yet in actual practice has charged travelers, including our own organization, change fees. That's where the rubber meets the road (or where the metal meets the sky) for Southwest and every other air carrier. "No change fees"? Don't you believe it for a second. |
| Are we heading towards more individualised marketing and advertising? We are headed toward reaching prospects in more personalized, individual, one-on-one settings, web and otherwise. We may be going at them with much the same messaging in all venues--in fact, we'd better be consistent across all venues or we have no business being in THIS business--but we're delivering the message in a more customized fashion than ever before. |
| What percentage of your marketing budget is invested in digital advertising and why? Our budget is small, but what paid advertising we do and the vast majority of our total communications outreach is focused on the online/interactive/digital world because we can quickly deploy the right messaging in the right venues at the lowest out-of-pocket and opportunity cost.
In years past the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), Nielsen and Arbitron held the keys to the advertising benchmarks on which you based most media buys. Today your online advertising sources had better be IAB-compliant (the Interactive Advertising Bureau, founded in 2003 by a consortium of some of the world's most web-savvy organizations) and, although it feels increasingly like we have all sold our soul to the Google gods, you'd do well to keep an eye on the Google PageRank of the sites on which you consider placing any type of messaging.
That said, Nielsen Claritas is the source of my favorite GIS-driven local marketing tool: Claritas Market Clusters, which provide zip code- and neighborhood-specific target marketing with the most colorful population grouping names ever (e.g., Zanesville, Ohio: Shotguns & Pickups). |
| What is the most surprising thing you have learned about digital marketing in the last few years? Some years back I had wondered how we were all going to monetize the Internet to ensure that we kept this wonderful living organism alive to serve future generations. I need not have worried; Google AdWords, AdSense and PageRank have given birth to entire cottage industries populated by an ocean of experts who have so many angles on every aspect of the online world that it can literally make your head swim. The monetization of the web was a pleasant surprise in that it is clear the Internet is not just surviving but thriving. Surprising in a less happy way is to swim among the schools of web predators who literally "sell Google page rank" and who convince companies to be focused, not on providing good business value to their customers, but on blowing the whole ad budget on Google AdWords and beating the competition through web subterfuge. |
| A few years ago, it was said that online sales would end up killing traditional store sales, but that has not been the case: how can you explain this? It has certainly been the case that online sales have put a serious dent in traditional store sales. While activists across the U.S., for example, seem bent on stamping out Wal-Mart, the reality is that many of the small so-called Mom-and-Pop stores they are trying to protect, with a limited range of overpriced items, were no match for online shopping anyway. Hard goods, groceries (especially produce), apparel items that must be tried on before purchase, and a number of other product categories are still better purchased in-store, and these, along with the explosion of population in nearly every world region, has helped bricks-and-mortar operations hold the line against online retailers. Another contributing factor: Sectors such as automotive, where more and more consumers are choosing, ordering and purchasing vehicles online but still go to a dealer or auto warehouse to take delivery and from that point forward will most often return to the dealer for warranty and other service. Or consider the process, used by the vast majority of retailers and even many wholesalers, where the consumer or business purchaser orders one or more items online "for in-store pickup today." In these and other scenarios the online world does not crush the bricks-and-mortar operation but complements it and, in truth, removes much of the cost of sale and in-person "just looking, thank you" activity that both buyer and seller are glad to do without. |
| How do you evaluate the potential of social networks for marketing on-line? Do you really think there is a new 2.0 marketing paradigm? Yes: The paradigm is away from traditional "push" marketing and toward web 2.0-based "pull" marketing. Social networks are currently exploding all over the world (all over the 'net) and no organization can afford not to be plugged into their power. Yet throughout my career thus far I have watched technologies and markets explode, then cool, contract and consolidate; nothing man-made lasts forever. So while there truly are a half-dozen site categories, each with 50-200 sites, that you must consider today as social media vehicles for your organization--and we are working hard to create backlinks from as many of them as possible to our clients' sites and our own--I know it will not always be thus. In a world populated by extremely busy people who are only getting busier, there is only so much time to traverse so many share/save and directory sites. Many will not survive and this market, too, will consolidate. The trick is to determine which sites are the best fit for each organization and focus time, energy and client hours on those. Oh, and review/revise every week. |
| What industry or market segment do you find attractive for devoting yourself to in the coming years? I have no plans to devote myself to any one segment, or to services vs. products, or to one delivery method over another. We have worked in these segments...
• Software
• Wireless and wireline telecommunications
• Cable broadband
• Next-gen/IP services
• Multimedia content delivery
• Networking
• Electronics
• Automotive
• Hospitality
...and are fully-equipped to go into new ones. One other thing that does position me effectively for today's emerging markets is that I launched the world's first ASP (application service provider) hosted software solutions to the communications market in the early 2000s. ASP is the forerunner of today's software-as-a-service (SaaS) and managed service provider (MSP) solutions, and having helped build an ASP solution from the ground up gives me special insight into launching, marketing, selling and supporting SaaS and MSP solutions today. |
| Be a prophet. What phenomenon will revolutionize marketing in the next few years? We are going to see greater integration than ever before between online, computing applications, broadcast, print and POS (point of sale) marketing; geographic information systems (GIS); unified/intelligent communications (UC/IC); and location-based services/tracking (LBS/LBT). This will pave the way for a new generation of two-way interactive communications that will enable us to reach the right prospects at the right time and place with personalized advertising and public relations campaigns. In a way that few outside the telecom sector recognize, this will at long last help us all realize the promise and reap the benefits that were supposed to accrue five years ago from LBS. |
| Are you part of any professional networking sites? Has it served its purpose for you? In approximate value order:
• LinkedIN + many professional interest sub-groups on the site
• Twitter
• Facebook + sub-groups
• Tiger2Tiger (my alma mater: Auburn University)
• PartnerUp
• Hoover's Connect
• iMedia Connection
• Perfect Networker
• ZoomInfo
• Spoke
• Naymz
The top five have been useful in terms of connecting with like-minded professionals as well as being sources of business and career opportunities. |
| How do you do your own personal branding? What do you recommend other professionals do to position themselves in the job market? By establishing my brand, image and areas of expertise in all relevant online venues; through in-person speaking engagements, white papers and industry groups; and via other credibility-enhancers such getting my firm listed by Hoover's, Dun & Bradstreet and all major web search engines and local/regional/national directory listing services. |
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[jeffcotrupe]
Jeff Cotrupe: MarketPOWER™, LLC
Oceanside, CA, USA
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