But critics have faulted the policy minds, saying BPO was only a subset of the ubiquitous ICT, which would have been the key pillar. …

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Browse the typical I.T. company’s Web site and you’ll find a long list of tired, meaningless clichés in the “About Us” section. Something like: “We create value for clients with unique end-to-end solutions that streamline business processes and enhance operational efficiency.” Look depressingly familiar?

Marketing guru David Meerman Scott took India’s tech companies to task for sloppy marketing in a talk here at the Nasscom industry conference in Mumbai. “It’s like a cult the way you guys talk – what the heck does this mean?” he asked, after reading a company description loaded with hollow catch-phrases.

Basic corporate marketing collateral should do two things: 1) state clearly what the firm actually does; and 2) differentiate it from the pack. In the I.T sector – where dozens of me-too outsourcing and software companies peddle nearly identical services to CIOs around the world – that differentiation is becoming ever more critical.

Alas, too many I.T. companies fail on both counts. So you’re “adding value” and “offering end-to-end solutions,” are you? That describes a casino and a sandwich bar as well as it does a software company. Why not tell us point blank that you design software for clients in industries including A, B and C, or that your business process outsourcing services include call center support and insurance claims processing. And please, please, stop using the term “solution”! This isn’t a math problem.

Over lunch I talked it over with Amrita Joshi, a marketing consultant for I.T. and outsourcing providers. Except for a handful of big players in the industry like Infosys and Wipro, she said, most I.T. companies treat marketing as an afterthought. “If you look at most of the providers, they have very junior people doing marketing,” she said. “They don’t view it as a strategic function.”

It’s not just the words you use that can do you in, but the pictures too. Scott noted in his talk that many Indian companies, bizarrely, tend to shy away from showing Indian faces on their Web sites. Instead, there’s an East Asian lady with a headset or a group of “multicultural happy people” sitting at a table – generally, people that don’t look like they’re employees OR customers of the company in question.

“Who the hell are these people?” he asked. His solution: use company employees in your marketing collateral.

Scott, a marketing strategist who travels the world preaching the fundamentals of message-making, pointed out that big companies in all sorts of industries make these mistakes. (I tend to believe I.T. companies are particularly egregious self-marketers.) He showed Walt Disney Co.’s old description of itself as providing “unparalleled entertainment experiences” with “well-connected businesses that operate in concert to maximize exposure and growth worldwide.” As he pointed out, it’s probably better to just say you’re into movies and theme parks.

The rest of Scott’s speech felt like it should have been given in 2007: Online advertising is where it’s at, he said. Get yourself on Facebook. Make a cool YouTube video about your company that becomes viral (oddly, he chose IBM as his poster child for viral coolness). Why spend money on TV and radio and direct mail? Etc, etc.

All good points, but if you really need that advice in 2010, maybe the tech industry isn’t for you?

Source: wsj.com

Amrita Tahiliani Joshi
President: Ahilia Inc. – amrita@ahilia.com
800.489.5197 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              800.489.5197      end_of_the_skype_highlighting – 530.304.9026 (mobile)
503 4th St. Suite B :: Davis, CA 95616
www.ahilia.com

Berenbeim will teach two four week business ethics seminars – one to Law and the other to Master of Law students. In addition, he will provide advice on meetings, general programs, and curriculum development.

Berenbeim, an authority on business ethics and corporate governance issues, has authored 44 studies for The Conference Board, most recently Working at the Intersection of Human Resources, Ethics, and Compliance—the Need for Collaboration in October.

He is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Specialists Program. This program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.

“Receiving a Fulbright award is a great honor,” says Jon Spector, CEO of The Conference Board. “Ron has focused on ethics research for more than two decades, and over this long period has made significant contributions to the thinking in the field. I, along with the entire The Conference Board, want to congratulate Ron on this significant career achievement.”

The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. More than 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts, and other fields.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE BOARD

The Conference Board is a global, independent business membership and research association working in the public interest. Our mission is unique: To provide the world’s leading organizations with the practical knowledge they need to improve their performance and better serve society. The Conference Board is a non-advocacy, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States.

Further information:

Frank Tortorici (212) 339-0231
f.tortorici@conference-board.org

Dubbed Spotfire 3.1, the latest iteration promises a natural language statistical experience. Spotfire 3.1 aims to help anyone in an organization get fact-based answers to questions that help drive revenue.

The company says its software is not just for analytics gurus but also marketing professionals, business development managers and others who need forward-looking business intelligence in a hurry. [TIBCO Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, which for the most part aggregate historical trends only, Spotfire 3.1 projects them forward with what-if scenarios,” says Mark Lorion, vice president of marketing for TIBCO Spotfire. “Anyone in the company can ask questions on demand and our analytics will provide future predictions based on behind-the-scenes data-driven methods. Users don’t have to understand the methods. They just have to ask the questions – and they get answers instantly rather than waiting days like you would with today’s business intelligence (BI) tools.”

Spotfire 3.1 in action

Let’s say you’re trying to promote a new product in the consumer goods market. Spotfire 3.1 lets you choose input variables based on what you suspect might be driving the advertisement response, such as price, discounts, packaged offers, age of the respondent or length of time as a customer. You would then press a button that asks, “Are these related?”

After you push that button, Spotfire 3.1 works behind the scenes to run predictive models, using analytics and statistics to compile sensitivity analysis and correlations, then return a colorful graph that shows the response rate and which factors are most closely correlated to people clicking on your advertisement.

The software’s multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, ‘free-dimensional’ data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

While BI gives you historical data, the predictive analytics aspect of Spotfire 3.1 offers insights into what could happen next time you run a similar promotion. It can also help you fine-tune your promotions by targeting the customers that clicked on your ad, or offering different promotions to different audiences – and it does it almost instantly.

Unlike traditional BI or static spreadsheets, Lorion says Spotfire 3.1 also includes conditional coloring and lasso and axis marking that allow for better data analysis of patterns, clusters and correlations among sets of variables. The software’s multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, “free-dimensional” data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

“IT organization and statistician groups aren’t able to respond quickly enough to the many questions that arise from business users, so they go to their gut,” Lorion says. “Spotfire lets you make fact-based decisions rather than gut-based decisions.”

Predictive analytics challenges

Of course, predictive analytics software is not a new concept, and Lorion admits that the predictions are only as good as the quality and breadth of the available data. But predictive analytics is gaining momentum in the enterprise marketplace.

The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it

IBM bought predictive analytics firm SPSS last July for $1.2 billion. And IDC predicts the $1.4 billion market for advanced analytics, of which predictive analytics is a subset, will grow 10 percent annually through 2011. Despite tight IT budgets, Lorion is optimistic about the space and the company’s offering.

“The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it,” Lorion says. “Companies don’t want to hire PhDs to make sense of their statistics. But we need to drive awareness of our product and educate the market that the power of predictive analytics isn’t in the hands of only a couple of statisticians.”

Spotfire 3.1 works in tandem with Spotfire Application Data Services to let companies analyze data from various sources, including SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications, and the Oracle E-Business Suite.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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