My 16-year-old son told me my blog has a boring name. He suggested that I call it the “Do what I say or your marketing will fail” blog. Or the “Listen to me or I’ll yell at you some more about your pitiful marketing” blog. (You can tell he has a unique perspective about my life as an analyst. He finds it interesting that I “tell” people what to do for a living. Not that I help or advise folks. Says something about my style as viewed through his teenage — and tireless subject of my parenting– lens.)
I hate naming things. I let my husband choose the kids’ names. I hated naming as a product marketing manager and I still hate it today. I’m not good at catchy or clever; I’m excellent at analysis, getting the details right, seeing the big picture, product differentiation, and translating tech to business. But naming? Yuck! So coming up with a name for my blog was a real challenge. Here was my thought process on the matter:
1) B2B marketing is essential. Professionally, I’m all about marketing enterprise-level, highly-considered, business-oriented stuff. Don’t have much experience with consumer product marketing and, frankly, couldn’t care less to about it. Figuring out how to position, message, and deliver technology for line of business audiences is my passion. B2B is the short-cut I adopted to refer to all of that.
2) A name should last the test of time. I’m a research analyst for Forrester writing about B2B marketing best practices today. I have been a software product marketer for 10+ years prior to that. Where will I go next? Who knows! But I wanted my blog name to grow along with me. Something like the “B2B Marketing Times” of the “B2B Marketing Post” — paying homage to those time-honored names of publications people recognize as “the place” to go for the news and straight story on B2B marketing.
3) Tip my hat to social media. I believe social computing has — and will continue to — profoundly change how people communicate and engage with each other. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle, to echo a trite, but true, sentiment. Rather than focus on the media, however, I picked “post” over “times” because individual blog entries are called posts and POST is the term we coined here at Forrester to describe a simple, straightforward methodology for setting marketing strategy.
So I managed to be a bit clever in the end, although I swear creative naming is still not my strong suit. Unfortunately, this has done little to impress my son. He rolls his eyes. The name explanation has done little to diminish my dorkiness or raise my standing in his world view.
Thank goodness he’s not in the “P” people (audience) for my blog and my objective is not to change the nature of my relationship with him via my posts. I use this blog to amplify and echo my research and thinking around B2B marketing — not to reflect (except on occasion) about the challenges of raising a teenager. If only B2B marketing were as easy. . .
