If you want to be good enough, focus on shoring up your weaknesses. If you want to be extraordinary, forget your weaknesses and focus on building up your strengths.

The idea was proposed in the context of how to become extraordinary at whatever it is you do, and in the context of how to evaluate your performance at work.

But why do we not apply the same principle to the corporation and what it does for its customers?

Most of us are – or at least we claim to be – obsessed with customer satisfaction and loyalty. We want our customers to love us and to keep coming back.

So we ask, generally in a survey. Every time a customer wants to leave us (you’re lucky if you’re in a renewal or subscription-based business – your customers have to tell you they want to leave) we ask “Why?” and we learn something about what we’ve done wrong (or what our competition has done right).

Some companies go so far as to try to keep a customer from leaving (think telephone carriers and credit card issuers). I’m sure you’ve had the experience of trying to cancel your service and being sent to the “retention department” who then tries, essentially, to bribe you to stay – and take an offer attractive enough to put up with whatever they did that caused you to want to leave in the first place.

What if, instead of working to fix all the reasons customers left us, we worked on doing even more of what made customers stay?

If you already do that, congratulations. You probably have raving fans for customer. If you don’t, then it’s time to get started.

Start by asking your most loyal (not your biggest, your most loyal) customers why they stick around and keep coming back. I’m pretty sure the reasons will look very little like the reasons other customers leave.

Then ask a group of your customers who are not all that loyal,  but seem to stick around (or come back now and then) anyway: Why are they not all that loyal (probably the same reasons others leave) and why do they come back (probably the same reasons your most loyal customers stay).

Now comes the hard work: Focus on getting better at your strengths. Strengths are the reasons your most loyal customers stay.

Figure out what you are doing right in every single aspect of how you relate to your most loyal customers and do more of it. Refine it, improve it and make it the best in the business, bar none.

And forget about your weaknesses. Weaknesses are the reasons those customers hate you and don’t want to do business with you any more.

Yes, you will find that more unhappy customers will come out of the woodwork. They’ll complain, wondering why you don’t seem to want their business any more.

In fact, you don’t. You cannot be all things to all people, so be what you are good at being and stop trying to be what you are not (feel free to insert your own rant about authenticity here). Letting a group of customers (read: paying customers) go can be scary, but the focus and the new customers you gain will be worth it.

Doing this will also help you define what type of customer is good for your business and what type isn’t. It will give you a different (you might find, better) way to segment your market, and you’ll find that the core of your new segment is much more profitable than the old, less appropriate, segments.

And you’ll find that you end up not only with customers who are more loyal, but they’ll all tell their friends (and colleagues) and you’ll probably end up with even more customers who become just as loyal.

And your (new) customers will become your raving fans.

The audience was smaller than in past years, which was not at all surprising, but still represented the marketing leadership of a diverse set of companies and organizations – enough so that it was not hard to see how different sectors and industries are faring, and how the thinking differs – or doesn’t – across these businesses. (you can read more on the twitter stream, some commentary on it from day one and day two and read another perspective on the conference)

I heard discussion of the expected topics, such as measurement, marketing mix and spending and investment allocation, plus branding, promotion, channels and the long list of things marketers think about. But after a day and one-half listening to and talking with this group of marketing leaders, there were two things that were notably missing.

I’m pretty sure that if you’re bothering to read this, you don’t need to be convinced that an economic downturn, regardless of how severe or prolonged, is the time when it is imperative that great companies (read: the ones that want to survive) innovate – not just creating a few new, related products, but re-think the way they relate to their customers and the rest of their market, they way they develop and roll-out product (I am intentionally avoiding the word “launch” here) and how they manage the marketing investment for their companies.

I won’t suggest that there were no interesting ideas offered. There were a few. But out of 12 panels and presentations, not one was focused on innovation in marketing or how companies can create the kind of significant differentiation that will allow them to succeed in bad times and dominate when the market turns up again.

I would hate to suggest that, among this group, not one person was thinking about how to do this for their company (or clients for the branding firms in attendance), but there was little to no talk of this, either on stage or in the hallway between sessions. The thing that struck me also, is how much of the conversation still assumes that marketers own and define their brand themselves (hint: your market owns your brand) and how much the style of thinking is still command-and-control-driven in most marketing organizations.

So what was missing? Let me start with these perspectives:

• The CMO as the portfolio manager of a range of marketing investments (some of this was hinted at by Ward Hanson of SIEPR)
• The CMO as the steward (not controller, or owner) of the brand in the minds of the members of the market
• The CMO as the facilitator of the conversation around the company and the brand
• The CMO as the steward of the relationship with the market(s)
• The CMO as the driver of a sustainable business model (no, I don’t mean green products)

This is the opportunity that faces us in this challenging market. William Pearce of Del Monte Foods suggested that one of the key responsibilities of the CMO is to be the “driver of growth” – and with that comes the challenge of how to put your company in position to lead the market (and gain market share) in challenging times and to accelerate out of this downturn, leave your competition in the dust and become dominant in your market.

Your market is thinking differently about its relationship with you – and your competitors. Are you willing to do what it takes to enter into a new relationship, start to think differently about how your company operates and markets, and become the organization that everyone else wishes they were?

I hope so – and I’d like to hear how you are getting started.

And lest we be reminded of this one too many times (and I hope I’m not sounding jingoistic here), it was 231 years ago that a small group of very smart people had a very different and disruptive idea. They gathered a community around them and created something never seen before – a democratic (system of government, not party) nation.

For much of what we call the “western” world, this is now commonplace. But it’s always possible, for better or worse, that somewhere in the world disruptive political change might be happening again today (it’s happened a few times since 1776).

But I’ll offer my admiration to those who dared to think differently and stake their lives on it (among them one of my most admired people). And I’ll remember that the ability and imperative to create change never ends, and applies to all of our institutions and every part of our lives.

Last week, I had two experiences which stood in stark contrast, and reinforced this.

First the good news:

I was invited to join a (relatively) new business-focused social networking service called Visible Path. In order to vet members to some degree, the service requires that your e-mail be a valid, non-spammer, domain (maybe more than that, I don’t fully know their criteria). So when I went to sign up, the site challenged me. The way it was stated caused me to interpret the requirement as the site admin’s desire to make an arbitrary judgment about my worthiness to join. This did not go over well, and I chose to, rather than join, fire off a rather scalding e-mail to the first contact person I could find on their web site. Within 2-3 minutes, I had a response back from Kathleen Bruno, who asked me to call her directly.

I did. She asked me what had cause me to think this, and how they could improve the process. We talked about this for nearly 30 minutes, discussing everything from word usage to my ideas for how to make the sequence friendlier and more transparent (there’s that word again!). She even told me who else in the company would also hear about my feedback.

This conversation turned my experience of Visible Path from one of a company who is clueless about networking (as an exclusive club?) to one that wants to engage users and make a valuable place to connect with others.

The initial experience was not good (I don’t think it’s completely my privacy fanatacism, either). But the response was outstanding. Here’s a company that “gets it.” They seem to care about the experience. They seem to care about making my experience useful, friendly and productive.

I’ve since completed the sign-up process and will be testing this very interesting new social-networking-for-business service to see if all of the cool stuff they offer really helps me (I’ll keep you posted!) (and, I’m not yet a raving fan of the service, but I am a raving fan of Kathleen!)

And now the bad news:

I spent this past weekend in Deerfield, IL. I stayed at the Embassy Suites (it was the designated hotel for the function). For those of you who know the Embassy Suites, you know they offer a reasonable breakfast buffet. Fortunately, this buffet included some hot food, like eggs and pancakes. Unfortunately, it also included cooked-to-order omeletes. Why is that unfortunate? In order to get any hot food at all, you have to wait in the omelet line. And on the weekend, the hotel is not populated with speed-focused businesspeople, but rather throngs of tourists, all clamoring for as much free food as possible (and ordering 4, 5 or more items). The line when I arrived was 45 minutes long. I didn’t wait.

I did, however, run into the manager as I left the line. I suggested that maybe the scrambled eggs could be placed in a chafing dish outside the line – not as fresh, but far more efficient. I made one or two other suggestions as well in my desire to be helpful and point out the error of their ways.

His response? He told me why my suggestions were bad ideas. He told me that my ideas were not what other guests wanted. All of this is probably true (I’m no hotelier, after all). But it left me thinking: This hotel doesn’t care what I think. They offer a generic service, and don’t care if I take it or leave it. (For the record, I’ll be leaving it next time I’m in Deerfield).

My experience of this hotel was one which does not care about its guests, one that does not listen, and one that does not care to improve my experience.

Contrast that to my new friend Ms. Bruno at Visible Path, who cared enough to want my personal experience to be a good one. I’ll be spending time using that service.

As is my habit, I pose the question: How are your customers experiencing your company? Are you sure? And what are you doing to make sure?

After all, Experience isn’t everything. When it comes to customers, it’s the only thing.

While not an uncommon tactic for technology companies (where nearly every vendor produces comparison charts that, while biased of course, compare their product to chosen competitor(s) ), this is new for car dealerships, whose sales tactics have often relied on getting you to make a deal before you ever had a chance to see a competitor’s model (also called pulling the wool over our collective eyes).

Saturn has finally admitted that its customers are going to check out the competition no matter what they do, so why not let them do it right in our shop where we can also engage them in the conversation about why our product is the best. It’s still a tactic to get us to buy before we go to the competitor’s shop, but all they are doing here is avoiding the conversation we might have with the competitor’s salesperson – who most assuredly won’t offer the same level of open comparison.

I might be biased by the fact that I love my Saturn, but I’d say after a few years of taking heavy criticism for some poor tactics and decisions, this one is a step in the right direction – and more importantly one from which all marketers can learn.

How confident are you that, when seen side-by-side with the competition, your customer will choose your product? (if you’re not, then you should think hard about changing your product!)

This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or whatever — rather than just with those things

In the technology business, we tend to be very obsessed with the technology itself. So many companies claim that what differentiates them is the technology (often only certain features of the technology) and sometimes it’s true, but not often.

But many of the real opportunities exist in taking advantage of all of the technology we’ve invented to do things (anything from business processes to making new friends) differently – and better than ever. Or what can be done because of the technology.

Think about the people making money by running businesses in Second Life. They are not in the technology business, but they are in the design or fun or entertainment (or whatever) business. And their business is able to have the reach is does because of Second Life. You can even say the same for the large corporations who have established a presence in this virtual world. They are able to better interact with partners, customers, etc., because of the technology.

There are two things I ask myself everyday:

1) How am I making use of all of the technology and capabilities available to me to engage my market? to attract new prospective customers? to start an interesting conversation? You might say, what am I doing different/better because of the technology I have at my disposal?

2) I market technology. What are my customers doing different/better because of the technology I market? We marketers like to think in terms of benefits (many of which are not really benefits at all). But if you pose the question this way, the benefit becomes very clear.

What are you making possible for your customers that was not possible before?

The topic of competitive differentiation has been coming up in quite a few conversations lately. The context is usually a discussion on how to create “sustainable competitive advantage.” A variety of different frameworks are used to describe it, from Michael Porter’s classic to the currently in-vogue.

When I’m asked how to do this, I have only one answer: you can’t. You can (and must!) create both a process and a culture that continuously creates competitive advantage.

There are lots of ways to create competitive differentiation. A better product. More service. Something free. Customer service. Appealing to needs as yet unmet (even with the same product/service). Hire better people. Spend more on R&D. Create a “faster” organization. Lower your transaction costs. I can go on and on…and some of these things will work for a short period of time, and some for longer.

But can you create sustainable competitive advantage? Every single thing you can do can be copied by your competition. Most things can be done better (they can leapfrog you – and will).

There is really only one way to create “sustainable competitive advantage” and that is to sustain the effort of creating competitive advantage. Sound recursive? It is.

I’ll offer a recursive description of this process.

How to create competitive advantage:

1. Do something disruptive. Create something that will not just frustrate your competition, but that will do the market equivalent of rendering them speechless.
2. Assume that your competition (known or unknown) has matched you and outdone you.
3. Based on the position you are in after that assumption, create competitive advantage.

And you know that if you don’t do this, your competition will.

Typically this is a phrase used by software companies to indicate that their software can handle the intense demands of the largest multi-national companies combined with their very large communities of suppliers, partners, customers, etc.

In this context, I was hearing it from SaaS vendors trying to convince the audience that their applications were more than conveniences for small business, but rather ready for prime time and the so-called real business of large enterprises.

Add that to the fact that this conference (as so many are lately) is centered around Enterprise 2.0, and I began to wonder: Does “enterprise-class” matter?

Consider: Enterprise class usually means three things:

• Scalability: The ability to handle transaction volume, data storage needs, etc for a very large number of simultaneous users and still give good response time and performance.
• Security: The ability to protect data where it’s stored, in transit (over the network) and at all of the endpoints and nodes with sufficiently high levels of security so that it can’t be stolen. Also the ability to ensure that only people who are authorized to see certain data can get to it at all, plus the ability to provide business continuity in case of disaster. And to do all of this in ways that meet a tangled web of regulatory requirements.
• Flexibility: The ability to adapt to different contexts, tasks, etc. And the ability to configure both the application functions and the user interface to meet the needs and preferences of every individual user.

Let me compare those requirements to the requirements that might be placed on a successful Web2.0-style consumer application (think Google – search, calendar, reader, whatever) or small-to-mid-size-business applications (say, WebEx meetings or SalesForce.com CRM):

• Scalability: These applications must scale to enormous numbers of users (sometimes in the millions, rather than the thousands of an enterprise) and data transfer and storage requirements. Moreover, where enterprise applications can be rolled-out in a planned way (and therefore additional demands on the system predicted and defined), SaaS applications must respond to unpredictable demands which can grow very quickly if the application/service becomes popular.
• Security: SaaS applicaitions may or may not be subject to regulatory requirements, but they are subject to the requirements of the market. They must be able to keep user data and user content secure and be sure access controls are in place and highly effective. For small businesses they must still meet all of the business requirements. But imagine the exodus from the service if consumer data were compromised (see any number of recent examples). In addition, these applications/services do not reside behind firewalls, so they must be built to be hacker-proof in ways that an enterprise application is often immune (mostly) from.
• Flexibility: These application must not only allow so much flexibility that every user can personalize their experience, but it must be easy enough for users to do it themselves. Small businesses must be able to create the custom restrictions, processes, roles, etc. that meet their unique needs. Not everything needs to be customizable, but most of the experience should be. On top of that, there is an increasing demand for these applications/services to be published as web-services in some form, so that they can be used in more flexible ways.

“Enterprise-class” has become such a loaded and popular buzzword that no marketing department can seem to go without using it. But that’s just getting caught up in the buzzword.

I realized as I considered this comparison that this is another element of the “2.0″ shift that is turning the market inside-out in so many ways. And it led me to ask:

Does my enterprise really want an “enterprise-class” application? or a “consumer-class” application?

new product <> disruption

Or in words, having a new product is neither necessary nor sufficient to create market disruption.

I recently had an interesting exchange with Judi Sohn at Web Worker Daily (a new favorite of mine) about GrandCentral, which gives you a single number that can reach you anywhere you want. GrandCentral is getting quite a bit of attention and generating lots of buzz.

I had to ask: Why? Everything GrandCentral offers, I’ve had from VoicePulse (my VoIP provider) for years. Other than the obvious price (GrandCentral is free, VoicePulse is not), I can’t find anything that GrandCentral can do that VoicePulse can’t. So why is GrandCentral holding the position of “it’s YOUR number – it’s attached to you, not your phone/device/location” which in today’s highly mobile multi-device world is important?

Pretty simple, actually. When VoIP started (VoicePulse, Vonage, 8×8, etc.) the selling point (key message in marketing-speak) was “this works just like your phone”. You got a little box and connected it to your home network. It had a standard phone jack and you connected your phone to that just like plugging it into the wall. You picked up the phone a dialed just like a regular land-line POTS phone.

Sure, you could do all this other cool stuff that got me and my geeky friends all excited, but the mass-market sell was “it’s simple – it’s just like what you do today, only cheaper and cooler”

This is a classic way to sell new technology: First, make it fit the existing model; second, show how it changes the model. GrandCentral is making the move to the second stage of technology adoption.

GrandCentral has taken advantage of the general awareness of VoIP capabilities and the fact that people in the market (mostly early adopters) no longer need to make it work just like their old POTS phone, they want all the capabilities that a network-based service can offer. So GrandCentral has gone to market with the selling point that “you own your own number.” It’s a powerful message, and it appeals to the people who were eager to move to internet telephony and wanted the capabilities to move forward.

Their service isn’t really new or innovative (OK, their exact brand is, but I bought the same exact service 4 years ago), but GrandCentral has turned on the second stage ‘boosters’ and is now moving the market forward – I expect pretty far forward. While for now it’s only the early adopters who will sign up, someone will figure out how to move this to the broader market pretty quickly.

And it is changing that market. Completely.

My question is: will the traditional VoIP providers take advantage of the opportunity to re-take their lead? Or will they, as so many technology companies before them, stand there complaining “but we’ve had those features for years!” – and go nowhere fast while their market escapes them?

What would your company do?

Do you really want to change your market?

SuccessFactors (blog) has as part of their founding principles:

Increase worldwide productivity by 50%.

They want to change the market – and the world.

What’s your mission?

Are you thinking risk doesn’t really work well in politics? Making a bold statement can certainly alienate entire groups of people, but it can also make all the difference. Think back to Newt Gingrich and company and their “contract with America.” That led to a change in control in both houses of congress. Or think back to the 2004 presidential campaign and Howard Dean’s railing against the Iraq war. That changed the conversation in the Democratic party and eventually led to the change in opinion across the country and another change in control in congress.

Marketing 101: Your brand is your identity. It is your point of view.

Disruptive Marketing 101: The point of view you add to the conversation not only matters, but can change the whole conversation. In other words, you (as an individual or a company or whatever) can disrupt the conversation and the market.

Is your point of view interesting enough and different enough to be disruptive? Are you willing to overcome the fear of risk and add your point of view to the conversation?

If you answered yes to both questions, you might just be ready to start disrupting your market.