Spreading your #categoryMeme is the third step in our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread framework, and takes off right where Replicate ends, with Enablement, then goes to Embedding and Incentivizing #CategoryMeme spread. We discussed enablement of #CategoryMeme replication in this previous post, and the great news, is the same principles apply when discussing Spreading. Here’s what we said;
Enablement – Once you’ve simplified it, create very sharable, very replicable assets and distribute them out broadly into the marketplace. Create a #CategoryMeme hashtag for your #CategoryMeme. Create a set of backlinks to a more detailed description. Create JPEG, AudioClips, Clipart, all showing and communicating the #CategoryMeme. AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, don’t just create them and share them, but let them fly into the world. Don’t trademark the #CategoryMeme or the artifacts, let the world own them!!! Share with customers, prospects, analysts, and YES EVEN COMPETITORS!!!
So we’ve done most of the work on Enablement, let’s move to Embedding and Incentivizing #CategoryMeme spread. On the topic of Embedding, we turn to our old friend Brodie writing on Meme spreading:
Some of the ways Mind Viruses encourage spreading are (by):
*Programming you with (another) meme like “get the word out before it’s too late” , pushing your “crises” and “window of opportunity” buttons
*Programming you a meme to the effect “teaching this to our children will help them”
* Programming you to evangelize the virus. Some synonyms for evangelize are …passing the favor on and enrollment
….Evangelism is the intentional spreading of memes.
Brodie, Virus of the Mind, Pages 145-146
If we want to create the conditions to encourage the spread of our #CategoryMeme, we need to embed urgency, cross adoption benefit, and membership memes into our #CategoryMeme. “Do it before it’s too late”, “The more who do it, the better it gets for all of us”, “Join the amazing club”, “A call to arms” are all examples of the types of Evangelizing Memes you can embed within your #CategoryMeme to encourage those already “infected with it” to Evangelize and spread it.
Lastly, we may want to Incentivize and catalyze spread through creating both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for spreading the #CategoryMeme. Intrinsic incentives such as the well known (but not very Google discoverable) #culturalMeme in the Jewish Community that if you make 3 “shidduchim”, introductions that lead to marriages, you’ll go straight to olam habah (heaven) . A clear incentive for spreading the religious continuity meme of marriage and procreation. In a business context recognition within the community of practice can be a powerful intrinsic reward. This can be facilitated and encouraged by #CategoryMeme designers through referencing (willing) adopters, and by creating venues and opportunities for them to promote themselves in the context of #CategoryMeme adoption. Extrinsic rewards can include affiliate and referral fees, badges and club identifiers and other tangible assets. (NFTs anyone:)).
So to encourage the spread of our #CategoryMeme, Enable, Embed and Incentivize its spread through the tools of marketing; asset creation and sharing, media and publicity, psychology and incentives, and good old #cash.
In my upcoming final post of this series, I will summarize our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread #CategoryMeme success formula.
In order for a #CategoryMeme to spread, the third step of our Penetrate, Replicate, Spread framework, first, it must replicate itself, and do so as Brodie says, “faithfully”. What does this mean? Our prospects and other market participants must be able to easily describe our category, in other words, to parrot our definition. There are three key steps to creating the market environment for #CategoryMeme replication. These are:
Simplification – Make it super easy to explain
Enablement – Providing the “pre-packaged” artifacts for market adoption
Reward – Create rewards for replicating the #CategoryMeme
Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid! – Can you write a 1 sentence definition of the category? Can you provide a simple and clear metaphor for it? Can you sketch it clearing on the back of a napkin? Can you explain it to someone who is not part of your market?
Southwest – A New #CategoryMeme: the First Regional Discount Airline!
Enablement – Once you’ve simplified it, create very sharable, very replicable assets and distribute them out broadly into the marketplace. Create a #CategoryMeme hashtag for your #CategoryMeme. Create a set of backlinks to a more detailed description. Create JPEG, AudioClips, Clipart, all showing and communicating the #CategoryMeme. AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, don’t just create them and share them, but let them fly into the world. Don’t trademark the #CategoryMeme or the artifacts, let the world own them!!! Share with customers, prospects, analysts, and YES EVEN COMPETITORS!!!
Reward – Provide feedback to those who replicate (and spread) the #CategoryMeme. Connect with them, make them part of a club, a community of #CategoryMeme lovers.
As Reward bleeds into more structured programmatic work, we then enter the third phase of #CategoryMeme success, Spread, which I will explore in the next blog of this series.
In my last post, I discussed the 3 steps to Category Success, borrowing from the work of Richard Brodie. These steps were:
Penetration – The Category must enter the mind of market participants
Faithful Replication – The participants must be able to mirror and replicate the Category idea
Spreading – The Category needs to spread efficiently and quickly from participant to participant
Let’s dive into Step 1 now in some more depth and examine the question, how do I get the category to enter the mind of market participants? Brodie suggest that Memes enter the mind through 3 typical paths – repetition, cognitive dissonance and trojan horse. For a #CategoryMemes, the equivalents are Repetition, Contrast and Problem. Let’s take a quick look at each of these and how they work together.
Repetition – Did I say that enough yet? – #CanYouHearMeNow?
Say it, say it again, and say it some more. Say what? – The category name. Once you name it, you keep repeating it. You get sick of saying it. You think you’ve said it enough. You have all your sales people repeat it. It’s in every tweet, every deck, every-thing! Then magically others start repeating. It becomes a market “earworm” and soon enough even your competitors start to repeat it too, and what a joy that is, they are building your lead!
Contrast – Framing the Difference – #NameItThenFrameIt
Once you name it, over and over again, you’ve got to frame it. “Unlike X, #CategoryMeme does this…”, “While an X has these capabilities, a true #CategoryMeme has these…” or simply “A #CategoryMeme is different that this because…” Human brains need comparison points, and we have to set up the difference for them, or we risk getting lumped together with older or competitively owned categories.
Problem – Attaching Your #CategoryMemes – #SpikeProtein
You name it, you say it, you say it again, but does anyone pay attention. Pardon the analogy, but the #SpikeProtein of your #CategoryMeme is the customer problem. And not just any problem, but a “Capital P” problem. A strategic problem that the economic buyer cares about, a lot! And one that your category solution helps them solve, and transforms their success, both personally, and for the organization. (for more on this, see my post on The Problem with Problems) . If there one thing to get right, it’s this! Without a “Spike” you simply won’t attach your #CategoryMeme to your marketplace.
So in summary, to penetrate your #CategoryMeme into the market, use repetition and framing to explain to the market how your #CategoryMeme solves a big P problem and other older categories don’t. Do it again, then do it some more.
And check back here for the next two posts in this series on #CategoryMeme Faithful Repetition and Spreading.
When you write a business book, especially one where you set up the problem with market trends, you always worry that the trends you have identified are temporary or will end soon, making your books relevance plummet. To combat this, you really need to try to pick trends that you feel strongly will last at least a few years or more. And if you are really good, lucky, or a combination of the two, you’ve found trends that are not just timely, but will continue to accelerate for even longer.
So I will write it off to 20% prescience, 20% market feel and 60% good fortune that 5 years after publishing Launching to Leading trends I point to in the book are even bigger:
Information is (EVEN MORE ) Abundant
B2B Markets are (MORE) Crowded (than ever)
B2B Buyers are (MORE)independent, connected and in control
YET still too many B2B Companies get stuck in launch and never become the market leaders they should because they:
1) continue to hide information (about pricing, demos, etc…) 2) continue to compete on features 3) overvalue value, thinking the best ROI wins
Instead of following the proven path in the book of: 1) Creating a compelling, transformative Viewpoint story for the potential buyers of their offering and category 2) Identifying the UNIQUE value only they can deliver to those buyers 3) Demonstrating, not simply describing, that value during the entire buying EXPERIENCE
For the longer version, it’s just 99c for the Kindle version to celebrate – So get it today for the price of well 99c, and if you write a review, I’ll send you an autographed hard copy of the book!
May all of yours and your customers’ Hero’s Journey be transformative and amazing – Ken
Before DancingCats, TidePods, BucketChallenges and other “memes” took over the internet, a branch of social science called Memetics was actually built around the idea of Memes. The term Meme was coined more than 40 years ago in the landmark book by Richard Dawkins “The Selfish Gene“. Dawkins defined a meme as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”, and sees the meme as information that replicates and is passed on. Further developed by others including Dennett in “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds”, memetics, the study of cultural evolution via the passing of memes from host to host in a society has been bouncing around academic and pop culture circles for decades.
After reading Dennett, I started thinking about how the ideas of memetics applies to Product Category Design and Strategy for my clients. Some quick Google searching convinced me that this is unchartered territory and to a book called “Virus of the Mind – The New Science of the Meme” by Richard Brodie. In this often quirky and new agey book, Brodie offers some basic frameworks on how Memes, what he very pejoratively labels Mind Viruses, spread.
Judgement aside, Brodie’s work is quite interesting when you think of Category Design and Marketing strategies. Brodie says that Mind Viruses work in three phases – Penetration, Faithful Replication and Spreading. What a great roadmap this is to category success.
So, how do we design a Category Meme that can do all of these, in other words, how does the category enter, replicate and spread across the marketplace. That is the $64,000 dollar question, or in many B2B categories, more like the $6.4B dollar one.
I must admit, I am interested and very infected by this idea, but as Mind Viruses go, this is a pretty rich and exciting one to study! In the next series of posts, I will try to unravel the mysteries of Category Design and Success, and how Category Memetics can help us to succeed.
PS – How many Memes can you count in this short post? Let me know your count in the comments – hint, you definitely need at least 2 hands to count them!
Sometimes, you just have to net it out! After nearly 14 years as a GTM messaging advisor, this is one of those times. The other week, a client looked at my Messaging Hierarchy and asked, “what are the message deliverables out of this project?” a question I get a lot. And then I realized I had never mapped deliverables to my 4 M Model of “Method, Money, Magic, Mythos”. So I did it and here it is:
At each layer of the model, I’ve listed the core deliverables that any B2B product marketing team eventually needs to drive go to market success. Some, the the Viewpoint Story and the Value Messaging Palette are in my mind, first priority. If I do I great job with these, many of the rest are by-products and/or derivatives of these. And remember, we are still at the “scripting” level of work, we still have to make the Go To Market “Movies”. But remember, just like without a great script, the right audience focus, the right stage design, and the right costume and make-up designs, the movie will probably stink, without these foundational deliverables your demand gen, content marketing, website and other content will be weak, inconsistent and ineffective.
In future blogs I plan on discussing each layer in detail, it’s importance, the related foundational deliverables and their roles in driving customer facing deliverables. But for now, here you have it, everything I’ve ever learned in one model!
A few years ago, after completing an engagement with Lee Hecht Harrison in working on the narrative for the launch of what became known as their “Active Placement” service, their then CRO Kevin Gagan said to me:
“Ken, when we started, we thought the strategy should drive the story, you taught us that the story should drive the strategy.”
That comment has stuck hard with me. Somedays, I believe Kevin is correct. I see this especially with clients who have great ambition for their offerings, and struggle to narrow down their message for better impact. But when they do, often it creates new strategic focus in many aspects of the go to market, be it product roadmap, packaging, pricing or channels. The story drives the strategy.
Other times, the vision and strategy are very well defined. Often driven by entrepreneurial leaders with an innate sense for the buyer and the customer, the product, packaging and go to market plan are strategically sound, but the story is so narrow that it undersells the offering and doesn’t break through. When you fix that, clearly the strategy is driving the story.
So I decided to ask my LinkedIn connections what they thought.
As you can see, they were somewhat divided, with a plurality saying that Strategy drives story. But I have now landed in the 29% that says it’s a give and take. When story and strategy evolve together, they can create a “virtuous cycle” of a powerful and impactful GTM narrative and mix. Story drives strategy drives story in a never ending dance.
In one Hatha Yoga You-tube class I do, the instructor says,
“Call to mind the sun/moon quality of this pose, the legs are muscularly engaged, while the upper body is crazy soft..”
Strength and flexibility, engagement and relaxation, each reinforced by the other. Story and strategy, the Yin and Yang of B2B Go to Market Success.
May all of you and your customer’s Hero’s Journeys be successful, transformative and rewarding – Namaste – Ken!
Having written last on the “5 DIY B2B Messaging Mistakes” I’ve decided to address another challenge, hiring “Messaging Help”, that consultant, agency or firm that’s gonna help you get it right. And while I admit I have a biased view here, in the sense that I am a provider of this, I wanted to step back and talk about how to find the “contractor” that works for you. Since there is no Angie for B2B messaging, here’s a starting point to help you on your decision path.
Here in no particular order, and my top 5 tips on hiring Messaging Help…
Beware the Generalist – everyone can “do this”
Beware the Specialist – too much speciality can kill
Beware the Low Cost Provider – price can be the signal of value
Beware the High Price Provider – are you paying for overhead or quality
Messaging or Domain Expertise – yes, you need a lot of one, but some of another
Let’s go a bit deeper on each of these tips:
#1 Beware the Generalist– Often an individual who has a great track record as a CMO or VP, they can do it all. But when’s the last time they did this? Think of it like hiring a retired QB whose now a head coach to be your Quarterback on the field. Or a general contractor, who hasn’t touched a pipe for 20 yrs to fix your leaky toilet. Can they still do it? Are they in synch with the current products, codes and tools? You get the picture. Messaging is a skill, and like any skill, it degrades if not practiced.
#2 Beware the Specialist – You hire these firms to do a job, because they are specialist at it. Then you discover that your web, your PR, your demand gen agency probably all have “messaging” offerings. That’s great if you want press coverage, or web or ad copy, but that’s what you will get. If your project is to build CORE MESSAGING, the blueprint or “bible” for your business, product line or service offering, beware of getting a great message for one of them, and thinking you are getting it all. Maybe a specialist messaging firm is a better answer!
#3 – Beware the Low Cost Provider -With messaging, there is NO barrier to entry. Just say you do it, tell a story or two, and then go to town. And do a bunch of other stuff too. (see tips 1 and 2 ;)). And do it cheap and fast. Well, you know the old adage, you can have good, cheap and fast, but you can’t get all 3. When a “messaging provider” is 1/3 the cost of the going market rate, then you should slow very much down before hiring them. Let’s say you were going to tile a bathroom in your home, and you get 3 quotes, one for $500, one for $1800 and one for $5000. Well, for me, if I want a good job that lasts, my first choice to dive deep into references, etc, is the $1800 one, unless of course I want it cheap because I am selling my house next week. There’s a reason why specialized skill like messaging aren’t cheap, because they are valuable and strategic. If it isn’t worth investing in, maybe you should be doing DIY!
#4 – Beware the High Cost Provider – On the other end of the spectrum is the high price provider. These usually show up as larger agencies with a very dynamic leader/founder who does most of the selling. Then they have a small to large army of “consultants” who do the work. This usually translates into more overhead for the provider, and bigger prices. This is OK, but the biggest risk is that the consultant or team of consultants will not be near as skilled and capable as the founder. Of course, the founder will promise you that they will be :involved: and that you are getting their best team. Is that worth the bet and the price tag?
#5 –Messaging or Domain Expertise – Yes, it depends. Obviously I am biased that messaging expertise is critical. That’s obvious already from tips 1-4. But do you need domain expertise too. My answer is yes but. I would NOT hire a provider to do the work if they had no knowledge of my space, though I would define space pretty liberally. If I was a marketing automation vendor, I’d hire someone who did a lot of sales automation but maybe not so much marketing, but I probably wouldn’t hire someone who’s closed connection to marketing automation was something like Support automation. Surprisingly, I would not hire someone who ONLY did marketing automation work. Why? Cross domain expertise is CRITICAL to creativity and out of the box idea generation. It’s invaluable in this line of work. Don’t over-focus on Domain expertise, if you don’t already have that in spades, you have a bigger problem then messaging!
So if you’ve decided to “get help”, I sure hope these tips drive you to a great decision and you hire the right person or agency to best serve your needs, and hopefully for just a few of you, that person will be me!
Messaging, after product and funding, is arguably the third key thing to get right for early stage B2B start-up success. Yet just the other day, a friend of mine who is a well respected Venture Capitalist said to me, “You know Ken, most of our early stage company think they can do messaging as a DIY project, but the truth is, they are just not good at it”.
This got me thinking watching all of the DIY home improvement shows, especially the ones where the pros come in and rescue the homeowners. Then I realized just how bad I am at even the simplest home improvement project, but that I am pretty good at B2B Messaging, so maybe I could share some common mistakes I’ve had to come in and “rescue” founders from. So here, in no particular order, and my top 5…
They focus too much on how, and not enough on what and why
They focus too much on themselves, and just how awesome they are
The don’t have a well articulated problem statement they are working from
They think a website is a messaging framework
Their value is not well articulated, unique or meaningful
Let’s do a quick peek into the messiness of these mistakes:
#1 Too much how – We mistakenly think that all of our uniqueness comes from our amazing how. The innovation in our code, our science or our other “special sauce”. But without the what and the why, the how is meaningless. Instead, ask yourself what is my unique approach, why did I build it in the first place. Why should anyone care. Thinking different and taking a different approach is often the uniqueness that matters MUCH more than the how. No one really cares how things work near as much as what it does for me and what the value of that is.
#2 Too much me – I had one client when I went to their homepage it was literally all about them. We have amazing customers, we’ve won all these awards, we’ve been featured on this show, our team is the smartest in the world. Many early stage customers are super proud of themselves. They are literally BRILLIANT. They have track records of success. They have PHDs from amazing places. They ran top secret projects for governments. AND, investors LOVE to invest in super smart people. Customers on the other hand, sadly don’t give a crap. They care about your insight, not your degree, they care about this product, not the one you built and sold for $1B dollars, they care about what you can do for them, not what you did yourself. So, put your ego aside, and focus on them, not you. Besides, if the battle always goes to the smartest, which it doesn’t, I’ve got bad news for you there is probably a competitor with better credentials than you have, let her brag, not you!
#3 – The Problem with Problems – I’ve ranted about this one before and it hasn’t gotten any better. C- is still the best grade I see from DIY messaging teams. And if you can’t build your message around a big, relevant and meaningful problem you are lost! Obsess about two things, who are you helping and what are you helping them fix. Once you know that, everything else is (relatively) easy. Problem is the foundation of your messaging and if you’ve ever seen a home on a bad foundation…well enough said.
#4 – Your Website Does Not a Messaging Framework Make – The best analogy I can come up with a trailer does not make a movie script. Your website is the OUTPUT of a great messaging framework. As is your sales presentation, your PR boilerplate, your product brochure. Making a website without a messaging framework will result in, well, crap. Don’t do it. Find a framework and use it. I am quite partial to mine, which is the topic of much of my book Launching to Leading, and can be downloaded here (but you’ll want to read the book to make sense of it).
#5 – Where’s the Value – DIY messaging doesn’t focus near enough if at all on value. Marketing and sales is all about a conversation with buyers about the exchange of value. You want their time, attention and dollars, and they want what in exchange? Something they need that solves a problem (see #3) and the benefits they get from doing so. After you’re done obsessing on problem, obsess on value. What value can I deliver that my competitors can’t that customers CARE to trade time and money for, not just think it’s cool. A messaging framework should help here too. And if you’d like more of my thoughts on both problem and value, you can check out my LinkedIn Learning Course here.
So to put a wrap on this DIY project, if you do DIY Messaging; remember lower the heat on the how and you, obsess about problem and value, and don’t confuse your website for a messaging framework…now back to all those pesky home improvement projects for me, nah, I’ll just hire a pro!!!
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