AI
I first met Ian Howells in London long ago, as fellow footsoldiers in the early relational database wars. While you had to be pretty technical to do product marketing in those days, Ian was technical with a capital T, having just sprung from university with a PhD in distributed databases.
Branding
Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. The dialog goes something like this: * There are so many products out there, * They are getting more similar, * Customers are more confused than ever, * Unable to see the differences between them. * Thus,
Communications
[Cross-posted from LinkedIn, see note.] <rant> I can't tell you the number of times I applied this rule when I ran marketing from $30M to $1B at Business Objects back in the day. It's 1:00 AM, I'm doing final edits
CAC
I've written about this topic a lot over the years, but never before integrated my ideas into a single high-level piece that not only provides a solution to the problem, but also derives it from first principles. That's what I'll do today. If
Competition
Does your competitive analyst introduce themselves like this? If so, you’ve got a problem. Not only because his younger brother Big is a controversial employee over in DOGE but, more importantly, because old Harvey is not defining his job correctly. Many competitive analysts effectively define their job as product
Demandgen
My marketing professor once said, The answer to every marketing question is, "It depends." Thus, the important part is knowing on what. So, how do you calculate the cost/opportunity? Well, it depends! On what? On the specific question you're trying to answer. When people ask
Demandgen
Why is it that when we want to add an account executive (AE) to the plan, we always think about some ratios but not others? For example, most people think: Boom! Then we're going to need: * 2/3rds of an sales consultant (SC) * 1/3rd of a sales
Marketing
Years ago, I was in a board meeting and a VC dropped the expression: "you can't eat IRR." I'd never heard it before. It sounded catchy. But, honestly, I didn't know what it meant. At first, I thought it was VC-ism.
Branding
I’m late with this year’s predictions post because I’ve discovered that writing while recovering from knee surgery, zonked on painkillers, is a surprisingly difficult endeavor. Onward, through the fog. And apologies for the delay. I’m always humbled by the act of making predictions. A few months
Career
It's always fun to go back and look at my stats, and my best-of page (which amazingly came in at #11) is getting sufficiently long that I need to find additional summarization mechanisms. So this year, I thought I'd share the top-ten Kellblog posts
Boards
Since many of you are in the midst of presenting your annual marketing budgets to your CEO, CFO, and board, I thought I'd write a quick post to remind people what board members actually care about when it comes to the marketing budget. I understand that, in the
Communications
While I don't do politics on Kellblog, I do analyze messaging, including political messaging. My point is not to change your mind on a given issue, but to study what works in the major leagues [1]. Towards that end, I wrote a post back in January entitled Analyzing