For a lot of us, Star Wars Day is kind of a big deal. We hope you enjoyed May the 4th as much as we did, and if you celebrated with one too many Star Wars cocktails, no judgment here.
‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ – Maya Angelou
In a chronically-distracted, over-scheduled world, it’s warranted to feel like partner marketing programs are at a standstill. Relying on traditional incentive programs, rewards card, rebates, spiffs (short-term product-specific sales bonuses), and conventional marketing efforts is necessary, but not sufficient. Providing that extra impetus for reseller reps to lead with your solution requires you to dig deeper.
What’s missing?
The Curse of Knowledge concept is a big deal in technology marketing communications. A great example is Elon Musk outlawing the use of acronyms at SpaceX. Reportedly a fire-able offense, Musk coolly stated in his biography that they don’t save time and almost always cause confusion as businesses expand their reach. He admonished that when you’re a rocket scientist too much is at risk to assume people understand the context required to make sense of an acronym.
The same is true for every product or business initiative acronym that you’ve ever concocted. Great for captive internal teams, but how about a channel partner with 20+ vendors on the order card or a new employee learning on the job, alphabet soup.
Some will call this a mid-life crisis. Others will say “finally, he’s growing up.” Haters will say “he couldn’t hack it on his own”. Champions will say “it’s about damn time.”
It’s about the people, both cohorts and customers, whom I’ve had a pleasure of working with for the past 15+ years. You see, I had a revelation a couple of years ago… technically two revelations; one as it related to the people I work with, and one about the people I work for.
We’ve waited all year for International Ninja Day, and it’s finally here! Get badass with these ninja skills to make your marketing worthy of legend.
Who cares if celebrating December 5 as the Day of the Ninja started from a parody website. Or that it helped promote a Tom Cruise samurai movie. It’s still a day celebrating all things ninja. That’s rad. Plus, we’ve been looking for an excuse to add “Ninja” to our job titles.
Now act cool, strike a tiger pose and soak it in. Ninja marketing wisdom all up in here. (You don’t even have to read the Ninja Burger Honorable Employee Handbook.) We’ll keep you focused by honing in on four key disciplines – events, creative, marketing and communications. Which just happen to be the core areas of our work at Lightspeed. Go figure.
