Category Archives: Marketing

Supply Management in the Decade Ahead: Same Old, Same Old — Only the Pendulum Swings Part II

Almost 20 years ago, back in 2007, I wrote a 2-part series on Supply Management in the Decade Ahead: The Eight Major forces (Part 1 and Part 2) where I discussed the various external forces that will impact a company’s supply chain, as verified by CAPS, AT Kearney, and their clients.

And just like you don’t need to read another state of procurement report for five years! because, except for the tech-du-jour, nothing has really changed in the past five, ten, and even twenty years; you don’t really need to do an extensive study or survey to realize that the core supply chain issues are more or less the same, it’s just where the pendulum happens to be in it’s swing on each major issue.

Today we discuss the last 4.

Customer & Channel Dynamics

The downstream supply chain will continue to change rapidly due to economics and government policies in some industries. In other industries, supply chain dynamics will be influenced by the poor financial condition of major trading partners in the chain. The impact of private equity firms will also be significant, who will continue to take public companies private, slash costs, raise prices, and change business relationships. (PE, which currently controls between 15% and 20% of the US economy, continues to get more powerful by the day … in fact, it won’t be long before they are twice as powerful as the stock markets, which only generate between 8% and 12% of the GDP per year. They may have a market capitalization equal to 2X to 2.5X of the US GDP, but we all know that’s meaningless because some of that results from foreign investment and an AI-triggered crash is coming.)

The only difference between conducting business today and conducting business in the years ahead with respect to channel dynamics is that these changes will continue to come at an accelerating pace and you will have to continue to adapt faster than you do today. That will require Human Intelligence (HI!) and Human Experience to accomplish. AI can make recommendations, but these are generated based on probabilities generated on unknown training data and can be useful or as useless as the AI telling you to eat one rock a day and strawberries with 2 “r”s. (And I’m not sure what those are, FYI.)

Increased Product Variety & Shorter Life Cycles

Variety will continue to mean more models, brands, and products tailored to different geographies and price points. Consumer tastes in emerging and newly developing economies will be new and different from traditional markets. Traditional lines of competition will continue to blur as companies try new products and markets.

While I was right that you don’t want to browse the web on the screen the size of a credit card, that only goes for developed economies (and in economies where the only devices most people have and the only internet they can afford is their phone, they are quite happy with that), it’s still a fact that you don’t want your fridge to tell your local grocery store that you consumed six litres of rocky road this week, and that you don’t want the ability to cut yourself seven times in a jagged fashion simultaneously while shaving. Amongst the big winners will be the companies that realize sometimes you just want a phone, a fridge, and a straight razor – and not all the garbage Gen AI-based hallucinators are trying to shove into these products today. And, oh yeah, there comes a point where it doesn’t matter how many fractions of an ounce less it is than the previous product, how many extra cubic inches you squeezed into the door, or how fast it vibrates (at least in the case of the razor).

People will want better (faster) and cheaper, but they will want it to meet the need better than last gen tech, not just different, and they don’t want to sacrifice what they have just to get something different. And while Weird Al lamented that his computer was obsolete before I opened the box, we’ve entered an age where most products are obsolete once the first unit is produced … which could be months before it gets into the hands of consumers.

Social Responsibilities

Companies in developed economies will continue to be held to high standards wherever they do business in the world. Companies will have to monitor working conditions in their supply chains all the way back to basic extractive and farming practices. Supply management will have to ensure that the supply base meets environment standards. Commitments to a diversified supply-base will become more important in developed economies, and in a significant sub-set of those now insist on DEI requirements (while one country now insists on no DEI).

However, we are still in the age of CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility. While it’s been proven again and again that consumers won’t pay more (than 1% to 2% above the lowest price) for CSR brands, if products and prices more or less equal, they will generally choose the responsible brand over the irresponsible one.

Environmental Responsibilities

Twenty years ago we said that continuing the social responsibility theme, customers, consumers, shareholders, non-govermental organizations, and governmental bodies will all increase their scrutiny of corporate environmental practices in all regions of the world and demand that companies take environmentally friendly actions. Companies will be forced to meet the environmental expectations of the general populace. Environmental issues will become brand-related issues and influence how companies are viewed in the marketplace. And with the exception of the United States, which is rolling back environment legislation faster than Walmart is rolling back prices, ESG laws have continued to be rolled out … and with the damage that “AI” data centers are doing, in most countries, expect another round of legislation to come later this decade or early next decade.

To meet environmental requirements, if you still don’t have across-functional team with executive leadership to monitor environmental concerns in the extended supply base, it’s time you get one. Carbon restrictions are going to come into effect in (more) countries, water restrictions will emerge, and other pollution control acts will also come into play. An organization will need to keep tabs on what’s being proposed, because, in many countries, proposed legislation eventually becomes reality (although it usually takes longer and gets watered down). It’s always cheaper to be in compliance before an Act comes into effect than scrambling later.

Maybe If Procurement Had Embraced Magic and Logic Decades Ago …

… it would not be in such dire straits today.

The Procurement Ledger recently ran an article on Agility with Purpose which ran an interview with Jeanette Hübsch, a Global Procurement Leader and Senior Consultant with Proxima, who said that in Marketing Procurement, agility isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity because the landscape shifts constantly with evolving consumer trends, digital innovation, and now AI-driven content creation. Procurement must move beyond being a cost controller; it needs to be a business enabler, a partner, and a source of innovation. And she’s right.

But she goes on to say that in indirect procurement, disruptions don’t always look like delayed shipments—they might be sudden campaign pivots, regulatory changes, or shifting budgets. Agility means being able to respond without slowing the business down and to accomplish this her focus is on building an adaptable supplier ecosystem—trusted partners with modular contracts, alternative sourcing strategies, and the ability to flex with us. Strong relationships, clarity, and scenario planning make a big difference.

In other words, it seems that marketing has understood what Procurement needs, and has needed, for at least the last two decades, but yet it’s still the sacred cow in most organizations that Procurement is not allowed to touch (when Procurement should be designed around good strategies that come from good Marketing Provider Management) and be allowed to shoot any scared cow ready for pasture.

Thought leaders have been promoting the embracement of good procurement by Marketing and marketing flexibility by Procurement for at least two decades now (and we first started talking about it in our two-part piece on Magic and Logic [Part I and Part II] two decades ago), especially since Decideware (founded in 1999 in Australia), one of the leaders in Marketing Procurement Technology, was just starting to break into the North American market at that time.

And even if they were a little slow on the uptake, then it should have been adopted when some thought leaders tried to make it vogue in the mid 2010s. A decade ago I penned a two-part piece on what to do if Marketing Mayhem Got You Down? Maybe it’s time to master the Marketing Way (Part 1 and Part 2) and ran a two-part series by Brian Seipel (of Source One, which was acquired by Corcentric) on why you should Ditch the Pepsi Blues, Already: Become a Marketing Procurement Asset (Part I and Part II). By then Decideware was taking marketing magic to a whole new level, but still marketing procurement (and the best practices it could bring) was still being largely ignored, even when marketing needed procurement more than ever. (In fact, Marketing recognition of Procurement wasn’t until mid 2019, and within a year COVID had shut everything down.)

While marketing suppliers (i.e. advertising agencies) are often very different from custom manufactured part suppliers (i.e. factories), and the categories need to be managed differently because of that, in a world where supply chains are being broken daily by geopolitics, unrest, and natural disasters, both require agility, creativity, multiple relationships and multi-sourcing, risk monitoring, mitigation, and management, and the ability to react as needed. The underlying best practices required by both sides are similar in theory and the lessons each side can teach the other can make both sides stronger.

So, if you want to be a better Procurement Pro, think like a Marketer, and if you truly want to be an effective Marketer, include some Procurement thinking. (And read the full interview with Jeanette Hübsch.) Remember that value has a cost side as well as a revenue side and both parties MUST manage both.

Dear Enterprise Software Vendor: Should You Fire Your PR and Marketing?

Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant!  Your mileage will vary!  (And not about any firm in particular, as a few non-isolated incidents opened up a whole new line of questioning.)

In response to a post by eCornell (which is/was here), THE REVELATOR wrote this comment (which is/was here) which is repeated here in its entirety in case it gets deleted, since anytime we tried to have a serious conversation around sales, marketing, public relations, and/or Gen-AI with Big X firms and/or (mid-sized) consultancies and analyst firms, they have quickly deleted our comments, and sometimes their entire posts rather than enter into a real conversation on the subject (and now we have developed an implicit distrust any corporate account and keep copies of everything):

NOTE: The following post was inspired by a comment by Paul Rogers

Despite feeling like someone walking the hallowed halls of Cornell University wearing a “Yeah, Harvard University” t-shirt, sometimes you have to say things that need to be said – which is the purpose of sharing this article.

Ask ChatGPT the following two questions:

? What is the role of the Public Relations professional?
? What is the role of the Marketing professional?

Do you see any mention of end client or customer success as a priority? Whose best interests are PR and marketing professionals focused on? What does the answer to these questions tell you?

Corporate communication has always been about putting a positive spin on business and the brand. It reminds me of the 1986 Richard Gere movie Power – if not a great movie, it is certainly interesting and engaging. Denzel Washington’s role as public relations expert Arnold Billings is worth the price of admission alone.

Unfortunately, beyond the company they represent, are PR and marketing people doing more harm than good?

Thoughts?

To which the doctor responded (which is/was here)

Well, SI, which has repeatedly told companies in our space to fire their PR firms going back to 2008: Blogger Relations, firmly believes that PR firms are doing more harm than good because

  1. you are NOT selling enterprise software to consumers and
  2. it’s not “image”, it’s “solution”!

As for marketing, corporate marketing can be good if it exists to educate and explain, but when was the last time that happened on a regular basis in our space? Over a decade ago … now it’s all AI-this, orchestrate-that, and whatever the bullcr@p of the day is. It’s all buzz, no honey. All show, no substance. All confusion, no clarity. (It’s bad enough that Trump has brought back the Land of Confusion with his populist politics that have taken by storm the first world over, we don’t need it in our workplace!)

So, right now, I’d say at least 6/7, if not 9/10, marketers are doing more harm than good and should be fired with their PR brethren.

There are over 666 companies in our space, and way too many pandering any type of solution you can think of. While we need at least 3-5 in each industry group – market size – geo region – module focus you can think of for competition, we don’t need 30+. Most are not going to survive, especially when most of these don’t have solid solutions built from years of experience that solve real customer problems (as opposed to just offering some shiny new tech that looks good but doesn’t solve the majority of pain points in real organizations).

This means that companies need to focus less on marketing and selling and more on:

  • market research, especially listening to what the real pain points are of the customers they want to sell to (and they need to focus in on a customer group here, you can’t be everything to everyone in our space and any company that thinks it can is the first company you should walk away from)
  • solution (not product) development — not shiny new tech, tried-and-true tech that works
  • market education, explaining what they do, how they do it, and why it solves real pain points after building a solution that solves the pain points they identified in their research

Which means, especially if money is tight, they should forget the marketers and instead focus on hiring researchers and educators. People are getting tired of the 80%+ tech project failure rates. They’d welcome some real insight and real focus on real solutions. If only the market would wake up and realize this!

Dear Marketer On a Budget …

It’s never quantity, it’s quality.

And audience matters!

  • The majority of people who follow a celebrity aren’t following because they want pitches.
  • The majority of people who follow a major influencer aren’t following because they jive with that influencer.
  • And those that follow a minor influencer are following for a reason and are generally of a certain consumer class (based on the common reason). Don’t ask a fashion influencer for low cost apparel to sell a high end luxury watch, and in our space, don’t ask an influencer whose only use for tech is to make brainless content for followers to consume to sell an enterprise product.

These are hard truths that have been the case since even before influencers, so the following linked post from Phoebe Sophia Russell from “In the Style” (on how 150,000 on a celebrity Instagram post only produced $800 in sales) didn’t surprise me. It’s like the new startup that forks over 100K for a big bash at ISM only to come back surprised when they didn’t even manage to get a single follow up demo scheduled.

Think back to the days when Oracle, SAP and IBM (and almost no one else) used to advertise everywhere, but see almost nothing for their stadium sponsorships, airline magazine ads, etc. All it bought them was name recognition — which was important IF you could get in front of a client who’d seen your business name (repeatedly) and not your competitors (and then instinctively thought of your company as successful), but they still had to get those RFPs and meetings, which means investing in traditional sales channels that would enable that. But that’s not a strategy the vast majority of companies can afford!

SI, which has been giving away free marketing advice (including great advice from Pinky and the Brain#) since it began (because ??? ?????? has no intention of being a marketer … but still knows what works*), including this piece on Marketing 101 which appeared with the FAQ in 2007, always advocated for intelligent spending for smaller companies which focussed on publications (on & offline), events, and thought leaders who had the necessary audience, even if it was small. 100 buyers who actually want the type of products covered by the publications, events, and thought leaders is better than 100,000 individuals who have zero interest.

And the good news is that, even though many marketers during the heyday of free money would say I was off my rocker, the best marketers today pretty much agree with me, include the Marketing Maven Sarah Scudder who has teamed up with Dr. Elouise Epstein (in their DualSource Discourse podcast) to help educate you.

(Which is great since there aren’t many of us left trying to … going back to when I started, it’s just Jason Busch, Jon W. Hansen, Peter Smith, and Pete Loughlin who haven’t given up. Fortunately, we were joined by Kelly Barner and Philip Ideson of Art of Procurement and now we have David Loseby, Tom Mills, Joël Collin-Demers, and James Meads as well … )

Focus, Audience, and Education matter!

* Every single sponsor of SI before ??? ?????? joined Spend Matters in ’16 (to ’22) [and suspended sponsorships] was acquired by ’19.

# The Brain Gives Pinky a Marketing Lesson
# Where Pinky and the brain devise a plan to market their strategy

The Procurement Space is Filled with Hogwash! It’s Time We Start Calling It Out!

Not that long ago, Jon THE REVELATOR noted that nothing matters more than getting your messaging right in an article over on LinkedIn. Quoting a piece from 2010 where, in the colliding worlds of traditional and social media, the line of distinction is not as clear. Even though there are no real technological boundaries to limit the number of blogs, websites, and news sites, it is only a matter of time before the over-abundance of writers will manifest itself in the form of Aldous Huxley’s greatest fear and lament that truth would somehow “be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” If not irrelevance, then one of information overload.

His lament echos that of Sarah Scudder who notes to ProcureTech brands that when we look at your website, we have NO idea what you do. You confuse us and say the same thing as the other 23+ brands in your space. Your platform is AI enabled/AI backed/AI enhanced/AI driven but what problem are you going to solve for me?! That the majority of marketing is the exact same messaging with no actual meaning.

As a result of this, and THE REVELATOR‘s comments, the doctor was forced to note that he’s getting fed up with the use of the word “content“. The Oxford dictionary defines content as “information made available by a website or other electronic medium”.

The Oxford diction then defines information as “facts provided or learned”.

There are NO facts in most of the hogwash these marketers are pushing onto the market. Therefore it is NOT content. Let’s start calling it what it is: HOGWASH! (And refer to our recent piece where we demystify the marketing madness for you for some of the more common, and more egregious, examples of this Hogwash!)

Content must be informative (precisely what you sell, precisely what it does, precisely how it helps the customer, and precisely what results the customer will get). Otherwise, it’s just HOGWASH!

As the doctor has said before, there’s a reason SI hasn’t returned to sponsorships [yet] (and that the doctor hasn’t authored any public papers/books for anyone in quite a while) — and it’s because almost none of these companies truly care about their customers anymore, once they take the (Investor/Angel/VC/PE/Wall Street) money, it’s only “sell, sell, sell“).

(If these companies did care, they’d be lining up asking us for the EDUCATION the doctor and THE REVELATOR used to provide, that, in the doctor‘s case, helped every single sponsor get the exit they weren’t even necessarily looking for at the time … because, even if it sounds plain vanilla, there’s nothing [potential] customers value more than the education and insights they need to do their jobs that their employer, who cut the training budget years ago and used the bonus money for a defective “chat, j’ai pété”-bot, won’t provide).

So, dwelling on this, it leaves the doctor with a question. Should we start calling out ALL the HOGWASH as we see it? Could we even keep up? Or should we stick to the HOGWASH of the week?