One of the most entertaining scenes in any detective drama is the interrogation of a suspect by adopting one of 2 approaches: good cop, or bad cop. It’s just fun to watch who will be effective. First you have Good Cop who just can’t help but empathize with the situation. It’s just an unfortunate situation for the suspect. And it’s not really their fault entirely. Just a bad set of circumstances. So the dialogue is directed at helping the suspect show that they have some good in them; and they can be a somewhat better person. And then there is Bad Cop. There is nothing friendly about this character. And so the dialogue is all about the disdain for the suspect. If the suspect will not co-operate, the maximum amount of pain and suffering will be brought to bear on them. No mercy. It is all about creating fear.

In watching these dramas, it is interesting to watch the behind the scenes planning. Often two interrogators will discuss and agree who will be Good Cop, and who will be Bad Cop. Who will start first? When will they switch tactics? The situations are always different. There is no one way with which it is always best to proceed. It always depends on the specifics of the situation, and the nature of the suspect who is going to be interrogated. Human nature and all its complexities. And the tag team of good-cop/bad-cop, are only effective if they can find a way to navigate the complexities of that human nature.

When it comes to demand generation, the situation is not that different. Potential buyers always start out as suspects who you may know little or nothing about. But whatever interactions occur, they must be managed in way that will move things forward. Just like good-cop/bad-cop, it is necessary for you to have a working theory with which to start. From there, you must develop your own script and screen play. There will not be one set of tactics that will work in all situations. Rather, there will be some combination of tactics that are dynamically strung together, all being driven by how the reality TV version of things plays out.

If it was just one suspect that you are dealing with one-on-one, you can expect to get pretty good at things. But the true reality is that you are dealing with an aggregated set of suspects or prospective buyers at any one time. And this is where it can get hairy and just plain unmanageable. In a multi touch-point world, there are suspects and prospects interacting with your brand constantly and irregularly. In order for you to “break them”, you need to devise processes to both track them, and reach out to them. And this is where it becomes useful to incorporate tools that will facilitate the effort.

When it comes to marketing in the internet age, it is no longer about message broadcasting alone. You must be able to effectively bring the suspect in for questioning. You must figure out the correct good-cop/bad-cop combination of tactics. And you must narrow in on whether you have the right suspect or not. Otherwise, they are all going to get away.

If you follow the stock market at all, you know that the ecosystem is quite interconnected with the Federal Reserve System, aka “The Fed”, playing a key role. Naturally since they can control both the money supply and the cost of money, it is something that the investment community is keenly interested in. Just so that all those assumptions that have gone into all of those investment models, don’t all come crumbling down at once, the investment community keeps a constant eye on The Fed.

But when you listen to the talking heads analyze every word and pause on the part of the Fed, trying to make something of it, things just seem to be getting carried away. As an example, CNBC mentioned that The Fed used the word “appropriate” 55 times in their latest minutes, compared to 16 times in the previous minutes. The analysis: The Fed may not know what it is going to do going forward.

What can you say? The Fed’s action have such strong potential to impact everyone’s behavior in the economy, that you could say there is a degree of over analysis that occurs here. But you have to ask yourself, does it make sense to dump your stock because The Fed used the word “appropriate” 55 times. Ok, I am being a bit facetious to make a point.

In the marketing world, there is a parallel to those Fed watchers. They are Google watchers. Where the focus on what and how Google acts is analyzed excessively. The danger is that we become too driven by an influencer’s behavior, rather than the behavior of the actual market constituents.

Going further with the analogy, The Fed evolves its decision making model based on continual and large amounts of data collection, analysis of what that data is telling them, and debate and discussion about what actions are needed to accomplish their continued goals. Not that different from Google, who continually acquires large amounts of data focused entirely on search behavior and patterns. With the strict goal of serving up answers to what individuals are searching for, Google also needs to evolve their model for the search engine results page. Just like The Fed, they don’t know how they are going to evolve their model, until they can decide on what the data is telling them.

Which is why it is important not to get over zealous about Google’s detailed behavior; just like it doesn’t make sense to over analyze every nuance we hear from The Fed. Whether it’s Panda, Penguin, or Hummingbird, those releases would be of keen interest if you were strictly an SEO company. But if you are solving a different set of problems for your customers, your focus must remain on those problems.

What is important is having pertinent data. Like Google and The Fed, your focus needs to be on continually collecting the data that shapes the behavior of your specific market. Experimenting with both questions and analyses than can provide more insight on how to shape not only your marketing strategy, but also your business strategy. This is the prime directive, whose outputs must bring you to a closer coupling with those that you seek to serve. Without you worrying too much about Google, Google will notice you more if you are effectively answering questions which your customers have.

Like most people, I frequent my bank less and less. There is just not that much need to queue up and wait your turn to see a teller anymore. When I do go, it is for something specific that has to be done by a human. So my purpose is generally completely transaction oriented, and not that different from going to a fast food restaurant and ordering by numbers. Yet, I have noticed that the tellers try harder to find ways to engage, with some level of mandate to cross-sell or up-sell. And just coincidently I spoke to a friend who works the other side of the counter who reaffirmed that there is indeed quite a bit of pressure to meet quotas. Quite surprising on the level of focus that occurs here.

There is certainly nothing wrong with the intent to engage and cross-sell. But what the bank does not seem to recognize is that behavior of those of us in the queue is changing. Just because I am standing there in front of a teller does not mean that I am in a shopping or browsing mode. My focus is on the transaction. Getting it done quickly, efficiently, and correctly. My view of the teller is as a customer service representative, not so much as a sales representative. And the proficiency with which those transactions are executed has quite an impact on my customer experience. Needing to pay attention to a bunch of impromptu offers just does not do anything for it.

I was pleased to learn about the next generation of super ATMs that are slowly beginning to be deployed in the US. As nicely presented in blog post by Research and Marketing Strategies, Inc, the super ATM will go beyond the capabilities of on-line banking and will take on an array of real teller transactions. Cashing checks, issuing money orders, printing checks, withdrawing funds in mixed denominations, to name a few. It all sounds so good. Just like regular ATMs, it will enable more hours of availability to teller-like transactions, and presumably more locations. And that is what steps it up a notch for the customer experience.

But what about that lost opportunity for engagement? That one where those avid human tellers are pressured to prey on. Well, it’s not much of a lost opportunity if those transaction-focused folks in the queue are not really, all that willing to give up their attention anyways. That teller trying to promote something new, just because it is the flavor of the month, is not that different than those website banner ads that we have learned to suppress so well.

As we have learned, the customer experience gets better when the banner ads get suppressed. We can just get on with what we are doing. Getting all of those routine things executed in a simple and efficient manner is what aggregates our overall customer experience into a positive one. It makes people happy to have all of those simple things executed, without any burdensome parts to the process. And as with any supplier-customer relationship, if the supplier can do the simple things well, it opens customers up to consider new services. But it’s not likely to happen in the equivalent of the teller line.

Cultivating that opportunity to engage more, means improving the customer experience across all those routine touch points. And since many of those are being digitally driven, it is here where the powers of demand generation could be better harnessed. With all of the regular digital interactions that take place, there is the real opportunity to build holistic views of customers; and to better determine how to seek engagement. And that digital tool set has to be deployed by a collaborative effort between both the IT and marketing departments. Only then can suppliers determine the preferred methods of engagement, and what has a chance of resonating.

No matter what you have to offer, no matter how great the benefits are, there is no consideration unless there is an effective channel to the customer. As simple as that sounds, it is key and ongoing preoccupation of the marketing effort to discover and optimize the channel mix for a specific offering.

At one time just prior to the launch of the original iPhone, a client of mine was developing video games for cell phones. Feature phones actually. Tremendous insight on their part. Cell phones were just starting to get powerful enough to have built-in cameras. And with that came displays that had utility for simple video games. Of course, we are well past the point of insight now. That is, with everyone carrying a phone around, there were going to be dead times where the owner was idle. Bored even. It seemed that simple video games on the phone would have a draw. And so this small bootstrapped company of enterprising pioneers, worked tirelessly to rapidly put out new titles. Unfortunately, they reminded me somewhat of starving artists.

Great talent. Great products. But the channel to the customer needed to pass through the deepest fog that existed. And the name of that fog was Rogers Communications. You see, the path to the customer was over the cellular network. At the time, game titles were purchased from the cellular service provider and downloaded wirelessly directly to the handset. Of course, this had the makings of an ideal, direct-to-the-customer distribution channel. Except for one fact. The cellular service provider had zero interest in reaching the customer. Although they had a direct channel to the customer, the navigation from the handset to reach the game site was impossible to find. I had tried independently for quite some time, until I finally had to relent and be shown how to get there.

So it had all the makings of an ideal channel, delivering to an ideal customer base, who unknowingly was quite ready to fill in that idle time with something rather light, and engaging. But unfortunately, that ideal channel was like going through a fog in the middle of the night, while passing through some unlit back alley. When the iPhone emerged, it was no surprise that developers for phone apps stampeded to develop for this platform. Besides the attraction of the hardware itself, the channel opportunity was a total contrast to the status quo. Apple believed in the value of the apps. At the time, they had already demonstrated huge success with iTunes and the App Store was going to get the same type of promotion. Apple was in fact a channel partner who truly enabled that connection to the customer.

Learning about and understanding the dynamics within each of the channels is certainly as tantamount as the benefits that your product offering delivers. And channel partners can be either enabling or disabling to the process of connecting with the customers. It all needs to be understood in order to derive and maintain the channel mix that is best for you. Otherwise, you could have an ideal channel, but it feels like quicksand.

So how many x86 instructions are there anyways?

This was a recent topic on of the Google Groups that caught my attention, if for no other reason but to be a bit nostalgic. As you might expect, it is not that easy of a question to answer. Part of the fun in reading through the chatter was the reveal that it didn’t really matter how many instructions there were. From the genesis of the x86 architecture, the instructions have evolved along with new capabilities in the processing power of the hardware. And so, new instructions were regularly created in order to enable the hardware to perform operations more effectively.

In reality though, things get to a point where the benefit of some instructions becomes marginal or of value to only specific types of applications. As someone on the forum pointed out, compilers use a much smaller subset in the compilation task. Only 30% of the instruction set in fact. Clearly it highlights the fact that you can develop a higher degree of proficiency by concentrating on the subset that matters most. As another poster commented, it would be nice to have compiler for video drivers, a compiler for math software, and so on. Again, highlighting the benefit of picking the subset that matters to the task.

And so it is with the tool set for demand generation. The tool set is growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, trying to keep up with the pace at which the world is being digitized. And here is where we can take our lesson from the development arena. There are more tools than we can use. The key is to harvest the subset that is most effective for you, and that you can develop the required proficiency.

Marketing Automation software has quite a luster about it. And with that comes the attraction to be able to mechanize so much. To do more. To do it better. And to be able to efficiently reach your target market. But as has been pointed out by many independent marketing professionals, you need to get the process developed before you can get to the automation stage. And when you are ready for automation, it still does not happen automatically. At a minimum, you need a dedicated resource to keep the engine stoked. That is, at least one dedicated employee.

Of course, it is a natural tendency to go for the gusto. Which in this context means the tendency to dive right to specific tactics with unwavering focus. AdWords. Retargeting. Youtube. Blogging. But that unwavering focus on tactics may actually turn out to be a short sighted vision of what needs to be accomplished. Much akin to working with too large of an instruction set and not becoming proficient or effective with any subset.

Successful marketers today are the ones that have established clarity on the company’s goals and capabilities first. And have established comparable insights into their customer’s problem and behavior. This establishes the framework through which the marketing tool set can be put together. All of the tactics need to work together as a tool chain, to complete the objective as a whole. Adding a tool is always about whether it fits with delivering your message to your customer. Otherwise, you may be succeeding with the individual tactics; surrounding yourself with an unwelcome lot; and asking yourself: “Who are these leads anyways?”.