Terry Matthews, founder of Mitel and many other tech companies, commented on the state of technology in Ottawa and Canada as a whole about a month ago (I just stumbled on the article recently). You can read his interview here.
What he describes is a sad state of affairs. Anyone in tech in Canada knows that his comments are bang on the money. Canadian companies focus purely on R&D and neglect so many other areas of their business (in part due to lack of access to talent as well as funding).
RIM is a great example of this. There is a must read article in Canadian Business - BlackBerry’s perceived brand value takes a dive - that came out today. It points out that Canada's top 10 brands combined have a brand value of $47B, in comparison, Google alone has a brand value of $48B.
The basic truth is that companies do what they know how to do. Most of Canada's companies are run by engineers and so it's not surprising that they invest heavily in engineering. Primarily it is because they understand the variables - propose an engineering idea and they are able to wrap their heads around and assess the risk-to-reward.
However, most Canadian executives don't understand marketing or public relations (at least not like they do engineering). As a result, they have a very hard time understanding the ROI, how much they should be investing, or the risk-to-reward paradigm.
In addition, three variables tend to further hinder marketing/PR investment:
1) Most companies at some point decide to give the marketing/PR can a kick and see what happens. They outsource to some American firm that charges them an obscene amount of money and then (knowing their client doesn't know what they are doing) the firm often sorely under delivers. Having been burned by the marketing/PR industry, they retreat quickly back to what they know, R&D, promising themselves never to piss away money like that again.
2) The other thing that happens is companies decide to give marketing a shot by recruiting in-house talent. This is usually an 'experimental' initiative and very little thought is given to what resources are required to achive specific goals. As a result they tend to end up with an under resourced, under experienced, and under funded staff/division that is tasked with marketing the company. It's far more common than it should be to find marketing/PR people working in companies who don't know how to do marketing or PR! Just look at RIM, they epitomise points #1 and #2 - they outsource heavily to the US and they don't know what they are doing internally.
3) Companies tend to approach marketing/PR the way they would engineering. In engineering there is a very defined process with deadlines for very specific product achievements. It's easy to say I want X and tell me how long it will take to produce X (VP's of engineering are very good at responding to those kinds of questions).
With PR (less so with marketing) you can't say "I want to be in the Globe and Mail, how long will that take?' No PR person can give you an answer to that - it could take a month, it could take a year. If you have a bad PR person it could be never.
With PR all you know is that there are a set of activities that you engage in and at some point you reach critical mass and things start to pay off. It's hard work getting brand growth in the market and requires endless effort - it's not like engineering where you have a product cycle and you just move from completing one cycle to another. The idea-work-finish patter doesn't apply to PR. For PR it's more like start-keep working-keep working-keep working
Personally I think a lot of mid-to-large business (tech or otherwise) who are selling products should force themselves to work PR/marketing in to their budget.
Obviously I have a bias, but I simply do not believe you can maximize success without the market falling in love with your brand. At very best you can create a kick ass product and then execute on an exit strategy (which is why so many Canadian companies keep getting snapped up by US companies). But if you force yourself to line item PR/marketing in your budget, then you won't end up being forced into an exit strategy - or put differently, you'll have a greater variety of options, of which an exit strategy is only one.
While talent and money tend to congregate in geographic hubs, every market has the necessary talent within it to expand beyond niche specialties. This is one of the great tragedies of this recession - the wasted and lost knowledge capital.
This ironically is why I think Linked-in is so good. The people and talent that companies need are all around them, it's just that they tend not to know it. I can tell you that Ottawa has all the talent it needs because I've worked with people who know what they are doing, so they exist (but they are scattered throughout various companies). The trick is getting the right people working together to create that critical momentum.
While the US still dominates the world of business, I personally think they are going to have epic social issues in the years to come. Which while painful for the world, is also an opportunity.
The question is, who will seize that opportunity? Will it be China? India? South America? Or could it be Canada?
I've always seen Canada as a mini-USA, with all the same skills, but lacking that entrepreneurial fire (Canadians tend to be sheep, not wolves). To Terry's comments in his article, who is coming up with a national plan to spark that fire? Or will we simply fall back on our natural resources. To do so seems like a tremendous waste when we have millions of people with the necessary skills to do just about anything we put our minds to.
What he describes is a sad state of affairs. Anyone in tech in Canada knows that his comments are bang on the money. Canadian companies focus purely on R&D and neglect so many other areas of their business (in part due to lack of access to talent as well as funding).
RIM is a great example of this. There is a must read article in Canadian Business - BlackBerry’s perceived brand value takes a dive - that came out today. It points out that Canada's top 10 brands combined have a brand value of $47B, in comparison, Google alone has a brand value of $48B.
The basic truth is that companies do what they know how to do. Most of Canada's companies are run by engineers and so it's not surprising that they invest heavily in engineering. Primarily it is because they understand the variables - propose an engineering idea and they are able to wrap their heads around and assess the risk-to-reward.
However, most Canadian executives don't understand marketing or public relations (at least not like they do engineering). As a result, they have a very hard time understanding the ROI, how much they should be investing, or the risk-to-reward paradigm.
In addition, three variables tend to further hinder marketing/PR investment:
1) Most companies at some point decide to give the marketing/PR can a kick and see what happens. They outsource to some American firm that charges them an obscene amount of money and then (knowing their client doesn't know what they are doing) the firm often sorely under delivers. Having been burned by the marketing/PR industry, they retreat quickly back to what they know, R&D, promising themselves never to piss away money like that again.
2) The other thing that happens is companies decide to give marketing a shot by recruiting in-house talent. This is usually an 'experimental' initiative and very little thought is given to what resources are required to achive specific goals. As a result they tend to end up with an under resourced, under experienced, and under funded staff/division that is tasked with marketing the company. It's far more common than it should be to find marketing/PR people working in companies who don't know how to do marketing or PR! Just look at RIM, they epitomise points #1 and #2 - they outsource heavily to the US and they don't know what they are doing internally.
3) Companies tend to approach marketing/PR the way they would engineering. In engineering there is a very defined process with deadlines for very specific product achievements. It's easy to say I want X and tell me how long it will take to produce X (VP's of engineering are very good at responding to those kinds of questions).
With PR (less so with marketing) you can't say "I want to be in the Globe and Mail, how long will that take?' No PR person can give you an answer to that - it could take a month, it could take a year. If you have a bad PR person it could be never.
With PR all you know is that there are a set of activities that you engage in and at some point you reach critical mass and things start to pay off. It's hard work getting brand growth in the market and requires endless effort - it's not like engineering where you have a product cycle and you just move from completing one cycle to another. The idea-work-finish patter doesn't apply to PR. For PR it's more like start-keep working-keep working-keep working
Personally I think a lot of mid-to-large business (tech or otherwise) who are selling products should force themselves to work PR/marketing in to their budget.
Obviously I have a bias, but I simply do not believe you can maximize success without the market falling in love with your brand. At very best you can create a kick ass product and then execute on an exit strategy (which is why so many Canadian companies keep getting snapped up by US companies). But if you force yourself to line item PR/marketing in your budget, then you won't end up being forced into an exit strategy - or put differently, you'll have a greater variety of options, of which an exit strategy is only one.
While talent and money tend to congregate in geographic hubs, every market has the necessary talent within it to expand beyond niche specialties. This is one of the great tragedies of this recession - the wasted and lost knowledge capital.
This ironically is why I think Linked-in is so good. The people and talent that companies need are all around them, it's just that they tend not to know it. I can tell you that Ottawa has all the talent it needs because I've worked with people who know what they are doing, so they exist (but they are scattered throughout various companies). The trick is getting the right people working together to create that critical momentum.
While the US still dominates the world of business, I personally think they are going to have epic social issues in the years to come. Which while painful for the world, is also an opportunity.
The question is, who will seize that opportunity? Will it be China? India? South America? Or could it be Canada?
I've always seen Canada as a mini-USA, with all the same skills, but lacking that entrepreneurial fire (Canadians tend to be sheep, not wolves). To Terry's comments in his article, who is coming up with a national plan to spark that fire? Or will we simply fall back on our natural resources. To do so seems like a tremendous waste when we have millions of people with the necessary skills to do just about anything we put our minds to.
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