So what do you expect from a guy who worked at D.E. Shaw in the early 90s as they were pioneering their use of quantitative methods applied to the practice of portfolio management? You can expect that he figured out how to build algorithms, based on a ton of fluctuating inputs, which produced the optimal output. You can expect he figured out the impact of all those individual inputs, the interplay between them, and the tell signals on which direction the output was likely to lean towards. The financial data was available. It was just a matter of figuring out how to apply the math. Of course, the guy is Jeff Bezos. And you can expect that when he started Amazon, he brought the same tool set with him.

Entrepreneur magazine recently ran an article profiling Boomerang Commerce and their Dynamic Price Optimizer product. It was founded in 2012 by Guru Hariharan, an ex-Amazon employee, and sheds a small amount of insight into the extent to which Amazon invests in algorithms. The part that is noteworthy is the gap which Guru sees between Amazon’s tools and its competitors. It was “mind-boggling” as he says. Advantage: Amazon.

The crux of it is based on both portfolio theory and game theory. Complete analyses are done first on historical data sets in order to construct a model. And then the fun begins. It is all about finding the levers and how they will impact the output. Although this is a retail industry example, the same concepts apply to any competitive industry, where customers have choice and aren’t completely constrained. The handiwork certainly sounds no different than D.E. Shaw. It’s just a different data tap.

It really is all about the more free flowing information available to any customer, and the ratcheting up of competition. Customers hear about something new and they go to the internet. And Google allows them to piece together the information pretty quickly. So if the customer is able to “know all”, it naturally turns up the need for suppliers to be gathering the same market intelligence, and figure out how their portfolio as a whole is responding to the aggregate of customer buying decisions.

At one time, I remember needing to complete field reports to document win/loss scenarios and send them off to marketing. Never to see them again. And at times, I used to wonder: how long are we going to be pummeled before someone at the factory connects all the dots. In today’s markets, lagging in your analysis and competitive decision making, will penalize you harder. Whatever market you are in, you have to know whether your whole “portfolio” (i.e. your messaging, positioning, business model, and compete tactics) is game worthy.

The heart of business today is information. More specifically current information. Certainly there are a lot of business process automation projects driving productivity upward. But there must be an equal emphasis on using data to drive your compete level. With an ever increasing use of the internet, by both man and machine, the data is breeding. It increases the need to collect that market data, find out how to sift through it, and determine which levers will enable you to compete effectively.

Elaborate con movies are one of my favorites. And no, I am not taking notes and making a playbook. “The Sting” is one of the classics that just stands out. Con overlaid on con. You better be wide awake for this one. Truth or lie, fact or fiction. As with all great cons, nothing is what is seems to be.

What I find intriguing is the entire setting. The mastermind has to think through the entire sequence of events. The interconnections. The interplay. The indications of when to proceed from one step to the next. The plan B. The type of players needed. Individual mindsets and their needs. It is all thought through. The con artist is a student of how things work. And that is a key take away for all of us.

You can imagine if the sales process was a one-step ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Do you want it or not? It sounds like an ultimatum of sorts. And buyers certainly don’t like ultimatums. If you are selling anything beyond the most commoditized of commodities, you are assuring yourself a ‘no’. And that gets you nowhere.

Isolated tactics do not get you very far. What is essential is that you invest in learning the big picture. How does the buyer discover their problem? What makes them care? What motivates them to do something? And where does it go from there?
Yes, of course there are models for this. There is the most famous of them, i.e the AIDA model (i.e. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). And there are also several others. Some are simply derivatives, and some are different. For example REAN (Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture); and AISDALSLove (Attention, Interest, Search, Desire, Action, Like/dislike, Share, and Love/hate). Whichever the model, the fact remains that these models have been applied to drive the marketing and sales strategies for various classes of product.

But the base model only serves as a starting point. There is the model itself. There is the tweaking and customizations that may be needed to apply to your specific scenario. And then there are a set of tactics that need to fit with the model.

One tactic does not a strategy make. In moving along the buyer’s journey, a set of tactics needs to be applied at each major stage of your buyer’s decision-making approach, in order to fulfill the buyer’s goals for that stage. And there needs to be effective transition steps to make the jump from one stage to the next.

The cost of your prospective buyer’s participation at each stage is a key aspect of the journey. Whether that cost is: time, convenience or money, it has to fit with what your prospective buyer is willing to surrender.

In today’s hyper differentiated and hyper competitive world, there is an unwavering pressure for results. With the rush to implement tactics, the possibility is there for tactics and strategy to get mixed up. The risk of course is that it’s just helter skelter. Too many tactics at one stage of the buying cycle. Not enough tactics at another stage of the buying cycle. And the premature loss of prospects just translates into wasted resources. Don’t succumb to this. Get a handle on the big picture first, and methodically figure out the sequence of events. And it’s not about being a con. It is about being able to effect the things we understand.

There is an assortment of media and marketers who are losing their way in adapting to models of engagement that fit with user behavior. As an example, Yahoo is one media platform that is thwarting my efforts to consume their content in a natural way. What is really hindering this is the presentation of AdChoices to look almost exactly like all the real article summaries.

A general media platform like Yahoo serves as a good source for casual leisure reading when I want to take a break from something. Their content curation is getting pretty good. But when the ads are disguised to look like regular content, it makes it harder to just peruse. Now, it forces me to keep my guard up so that I am not duped into reading ads. I am taking a break to cull the headlines and find new and interesting stuff, not to read ads.

While I am in complete agreement that marketers must travel along the path of their customers, I am not a proponent of hiding in the bushes. By pretending to look like something else, the deceit just creates an obstruction to the regular content review that I want to do. This type of disruption does not feel all that different in its effect, than the pop-up banners that have been beaten down quite drastically from the early days. To me, these in-line ads which look like genuine content just feel like disguised pop-ups. But, I actually have to scan it. Conscientiously determine that it is an ad. And then move on. And that is annoying.

As I say, I don’t feel hostile to an ad being in-line. But it must be instantly distinguishable from real content. Let’s not pretend. No-one likes to be conned. Visitors on a website are not there to be subject to a bunch of parlor tricks. The real outcome of using these tactics is the opposite of trust. Visitors to some extent are forced to keep their guard up so they are not duped into giving their attention to something that they are not interested in. And if a visitor is constantly forced to keep their guard up, it becomes a tiring process and eventually they stop visiting. I would say that is the wrong result for all involved.

We are in the midst of transformation in content consumption, and it is the content consumers that are taking control. If content is going to be put in front of them, it has to fit with their expectations. Content is content. Ads are ads. Visitors will always show up for the content and avoid the ads. While content needs to work hard to convince the visitor that they have something new, interesting or meaningful to say, ads must march to a different drummer. Ads must work with that ever slightest amount of attention and put all their effort in communicating one thing. If there are 2 things, that is too much to process and there needs to be second ad for that other thing.

Unless everyone suddenly decides to pay premiums, content and ads will always be joined at the hip. But they can never be treated the same. The resulting confusion just messes everything up.

You often hear stories of how a negative event sparked a change that would not have occurred otherwise. The realm covers both individual and business stories. Whether it is a job loss, a relationship breakup, being cut from a team, the loss of a key customer, the failure of a key product, it is an often heard phrase: “The best thing that ever happened to me was…” Well, the occurrence of a paramount negative event is not really a good thing. They are only seen as good, because of the positive events that may have ensued after the negative event.

But there is also the flip side, where there is no recovery from the event. A sudden and unexpected event hurls you into a free fall. It makes it impossible to continue doing things the same way, and it impedes progress towards your goals. And in fact, we often hear the phrase: “Things were never the same after that”.

In business, there is often the desire to stick with the techniques that got you to where you are today. No doubt, it makes no sense to turn your back on what is known to be successful. But it is just as important to be mindful of how effective your systems are, in light of the inertia of your customer base, or their propensity for change. And being mindful is more than just thinking about it. It is about measuring both inputs and outputs of your efforts. Objectively. Rather than filtering things out that are not in agreement with your working thesis.

You do not want that sudden trigger event to force change on you on its time scale. When it comes to demand generation for your product offering, it is especially important to be sensitive to changes in customer behavior. This is where it all starts. If you cannot generate demand for what you have to offer, it is game over. Time for a different product offering. And you cannot afford this to be a sudden trigger event, because it will always come with a certain level of collateral damage.

The reality is that it is never a certainty what combination of demand generation techniques will work better tomorrow. But it is certain that things will not stay the same. The effectiveness of various techniques can wither and wane, or customers can just get bored and tired of the same old, same old.

There is only one way forward. You must take some resources away from the tried and true and invest in different, as-yet unproven ways. You do not have to be a pure pioneer here. No need to for total invention. There are many tools and techniques that are out there. But ultimately, it is the creativity in how you use the tools to drive your messaging and sustain engagement, which is key.

With change in customer behavior that is always brewing, some of those changes will aggregate into tipping points. And it is these tipping points that you want to be a part of. Businesses that continue to rely on doing things the same old way are bound to get wacked one day. There will be a trigger event. And things will never be the same after that. Don’t let that be you. Reach out and find your place on the frontier of adapting to a changing world, and make it tip in your favor.

Yes it’s that famous phrase that just doesn’t tell the whole story. Whether you have an on-line or off-line presence for your business, you will have the lookers passing through. But we all know that everyone has some kind of interest, some kind of purpose, in “looking”. And the strategy you adopt in response will make all the difference in whether you make them stop looking or not.

For starters, it is important to let them keep looking. People like visiting websites because they can do so in an unencumbered fashion. No disruptions. No dialogue required. No one hovering over them. And no one peppering them with questions. It means allowing them to focus on the content and decide for themselves. Your website visitors need to be in control of the visit. The instant that the website is forceful, it changes the whole dynamic.

Recently, I can’t help but notice the increase in the anxiousness with which the sign-up forms are popping up. I thought that the days of the pop-up were over. But there seem to be an increasing number of blogs that hit you with the sign-up form before you have had much chance to take a bight out of the content, never mind being able to digest it. Presumably the reasoning for marketers who employ this strategy is the fact that attention is so fleeting, they have to jump in quickly. But if they haven’t captured any real attention, what is the point really?

This rapid and overzealous sign-up request does not seem that much different than a paywall. There is no monetary transaction, but it is not conducive to creating that positive user experience, which everyone wants. It has both a disruptive and smothering effect on the visitor, and in fact I would say that it tarnishes the brand image of the website. Even though the content may be quite good, this act of wrestling away the sign-up info (often by making it a challenge to find the clickable button to close the window), just does not reflect well on the brand.

Well, you may believe that it is all a numbers game with more subscribers translating to more real customers. But it is not that simple. What is key is the number of active followers. That is, the ones who are interested enough to regularly follow new content. To stay engaged at some level. As opposed to followers who forget they even signed up.

A good user experience to a website is not that different from a good user experience to an off-line facility. Visitors do not want to be completely smothered, nor do they want to be completely ignored. In both cases, the content must be organized and presented in a manner that engages. Windows that appear in the sidebar with courteous offers of communication (and where the visitor doesn’t suffer any significant disruption), are likely to be much better received.

As opposed to rushing for the sign-up and risking the turn-off effect, the focus must be on providing additional content that has a higher level of value than the posted content. If the visitor has come to your site in search of information related to their problem, there must first be a level of satisfaction with the content that is openly posted. Only then can there be a real consideration of whether to hand over that closely guarded contact information. Website visitors know quite well, if they fork out that email address, more content is bound to follow. And they will choose not to take the first step at all if the persuasion is not effective.