Christopher Carfi

Today I’m at the Business Marketing Association conference in San Jose, and just had the chance to hear a great presentation by Justin Crotty, who is the VP of Channel Marketing for Ingram Micro, a $28 billion technology distributor (#72 on the Fortune 500 last year, for what it’s worth). A few bits of Ingram’s strategy were communicated. Why does this matter? Because Ingram is in perhaps the most “commodity” business in the world. What do they do to differentiate?

They connect with their customers.

At first, Ingram was going to do an ad campaign around “partnering” with their customers. They pulled some prospective ads together.

The ads were abysmal. Stock shots of the attractive business people of all genders and races, smiling cheerfully at the camera. Ingram knew their customers would (rightfully) call B.S. on them. So, the drawing board was revisited. Here’s the result:

In other words, it’s not that the strategy is aimed at the customers…the customers ::are:: the strategy

Crotty brought up a number of very salient points. In particular, he shared another insight that was spot-on, especially in a commodity business. “If you can get customers to help you develop your go-to-market strategy, the you don’t need to sell to them anymore.” Think about that for a second.

Now, check this out. Last year, CRN (one of the go-to resources for Ingram’s industry) did their annual “Top 25” executives list. Number 19 on the list was Scott Goemmel, one of Ingram’s customers. They promote their customers, relentlessly, according to Crotty. (Apparently this ruffled at least one set of feathers…Ingram’s CEO was listed at #20, behind Goemmel on the list. Heh.)

A couple of other key quotes from the presentation:

• “Relationships create emotional barriers to exit.”
• “Supermarket card programs reward card ownership…they don’t reward loyalty.” (For example, how many times has the checker at the local supermarket swiped a “dummy” card for you?)
• “Every business is a small business…your word is everything.”

Good stuff. Whereas a number of the other presentations have been a little too close to “marketing business as usual” throughout the day, Crotty’s presentation was an unexpected oasis of clue.

I like words. I mean, I really like words. And yesterday, something happened that rarely occurs…the meaning of a word changed for me. It wasn’t that I learned a new word, or that I learned an obscure definition that consisted of a word I already knew. Instead, a common word, a word that I’ve uttered and heard probably thousands of times, has been changed in meaning, likely forever.

photo: elisfanclub

That word is “creative.”

Now, as someone who has been on the sales and marketing side of the business for a long time, I used to map the word “creative” to something pretty close to the answers.com definition of the word. I used to map it to:

creative: characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative: creative writing.

Or perhaps this one:

creative: one who displays productive originality: the “creatives” in the advertising department.

The word used to mean something akin to the above definitions. It also had a number of other overtones: the “creatives” were the people in vintage, mismatched clothing who were “fun to be around” but…ultimately…well, they were the flighty, flaky folks. (You know, the ones who couldn’t hold a steady job.)

This changed yesterday at MeshForum.

Over the course of a conversation, I came to realize that there’s another, truer, sense of the word. One of the other participants stated that he had made a decision to “live a creative life.”

When I first heard that phrase, I naturally mapped the word “creative” to the definitions above. And, since it was uttered by an artist, everything seemed to fit. My worldview was secure in its assumptions.

And then the conversation progressed, and I realized that I had completely missed the point. The word “creative”…perhaps it’s better to explicitly enunciate it “create-ive”…was not meant to indicate “expressive” or “imaginative.” Instead, it was tied to the root meaning of the word create…to fabricate out of undifferentiated raw materials, to bring something new to the world and to bring to life and fruition and success novel, tangible things that have never been seen before.

This idea of “creation” is in stark contrast to the common business tactic of fixing problems. As was stated yesterday, “when you ‘fix’ a broken motorcycle, the best that you can hope for is to end up with a motorcycle that is as good as it was before it was broken.” When you are being create-ive, you bring to life something that is additive, something that propels you, and your company, and society forward.

So…were you create-ive today? Or did you just fix things?

(Dave…thanks.)

Seth writes:

“It might be more than just semantics. Disney Destinations Marketing has a new department: Customer Managed Relationships. Here’s the quote from them that Tim shared with me, “CMR is our version of CRM – just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them.”

Sounds a little bit like Haystack, doesn’t it?

Also, there’s a nice primer on CMR from CRMToday. According to them, CMR is three things:

1. An ability to rethink, to reshape your organisation and its knowledge so that it is at the disposal of your customers

2. Internet enabled management tools which customers use to get what they want

3. An ability to react to the information being generated and used by customers in order to increase profitability

Here’s a link to the primer.

“There are no posts that contain truth in blogs about Politics yet. Search all blogs for truth?“

My amigo del fuego John T. Unger has some good news for Typepad users. Apparently, TypePad has released a new feature about an hour ago that now allows users to ban specific words, including URLs, to defeat spam comments and trackbacks.

This is good news. I (and I would assume many other Typepad customers) have been fighting daily battles against the overlords of spam, especially over the last two weeks or so. Another tool in the arsenal is great to have.

In looking at Dave’s site while pulling together thoughts on MeshForum, I came across his fantastic post regarding transitions in physical spaces, such as buildings. Dave:

“The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be a sanctum.

While people are on the street, they adopt a style of “street behavior.” When they come into a house they naturally want to get rid of this street behavior and settle down completely into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house. But it seems likely that they cannot do this unless there is a transition from one to the other which helps them to lose the street behavior. The transition must, in effect, destroy the momentum of the closedness, tension and “distance” which are appropriate to street behavior, before people can relax completely.”

Is it just me, or does this also feel similar in many ways to the idea behind progressive disclosure in interface design, or progressive trust in relationship building?

Bonus term: Intimacy Gradient

(Edited to add: I think I’ll use the word “sanctum” more often. It’s a good word, and perhaps underappreciated.)