Hasta Luego, Xerox … And Thanks!

December 31, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Today is my last day working for Xerox Corporation.  For a variety of personal and professional reasons, I have decided to return to Forrester Research and join the team serving the Chief Marketing Officer.

I have really valued the opportunity Xerox gave me to see the world of marketing through the lens of a $23 billion dollar company.

I'm heading back to Forrester Research

I’m heading back to Forrester Research

In particular,  I want to thank Julie Meyers, Duane Schulz, and Christa Carone for making this opportunity possible and for allowing me to participate in a rich set of activities during the almost 3 years I enjoyed working there.  My appreciation also goes out to all the great colleagues, team members, and other folks I had the pleasure to meet, work with, work for, and learn from as I experienced what makes Xerox unique and special.

For me, the highlights of my Xerox career include:

1) Experiencing marketing from the corporate side – and learning about the importance of brand, how brand evolves, and the role advertising, sponsorship, client experience, and public relations in the stewardship of the brand.

2) Heading up the Xerox sponsorship for TEDMED and the internal healthcare marketing council which taught me a lot about the difficult challenges and issues facing healthcare in the US today.  I look forward to keeping in touch with the great folks at TEDMED in the future.

3) Charting the way for industry marketing at Xerox, both for the US Field organization and at corporate.

4) Experiencing the complexity and intricacy of field marketing and sales operations while building new business demand for document services — and the benefits and issues associated with delivering multi-year contractually outsourced services. I’m thankful to my great friends at the ITSMA for their support, research and insight into the services industry.

5) Sharing my experiences with the great people at the BMA, ANA, ITSMA, Geehan Group, BtoB Magazine, and other organizations that invited me to speak with their members.

Returning to Forrester as an analyst is both exciting and reassuring.  Much will be familiar and much will be new.  I look forward to working with top B2B marketing executives at many Forrester clients over the coming months and years.

Due to Forrester intellectual property policies, this means unfortunately that I will take a hiatus from writing the B2B Marketing Posts blog while I concentrate on developing new research and sharing it via the Forrester blog for CMOs.  I hope you visit me there often as I hope to improve my public publishing frequency.  B2B Marketing Posts will remain live throughout 2013, but I will not contribute to it in any way related to marketing or professional advice.  I may drop a post or two about what I am up to personally, and may decide to change the focus of the blog going forward. Let’s see where 2013 takes us.

Until then, thanks for reading and I look forward to (re)connecting with many of you at lramos@forrester.com or on twitter as @lauraramos.

Happy 2013!

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What is a Marketing Campaign’s “Influence” on Deals?

December 13, 2012 — Laura Ramos
How do you apportion marketing effort to sales results?

How do you apportion marketing effort to sales results?

I remember my first one-on-one meeting with the head of major account sales at Xerox.  For a bit of perspective, this gentleman ran the team responsible for over a billion dollars in document outsourcing services revenue.  I presented a carefully prepared summary of the industry marketing team results from the current year and plans for the next period. Included in this review was my analysis of the number and types of deals influenced by industry marketing activity and the size of the pipeline resulting.

Upon seeing those figures, he turned to me and said:

“I would be careful about showing numbers like those around.  It’s easy for people to question the impact marketing has on sales.”

Like it or not, this attitude prevails within many enterprise sales organizations. It presents both a challenge and opportunity B2B marketers face at large companies like Xerox and small ones as well — how do you demonstrate the impact of marketing activity on the health of the sales pipeline?

Every sales opportunity or closed deal should have at least one marketing campaign, program, or activity associated with it.  If not, your company is missing an opportunity to drive the cost of sales down. Why?  Because business buyers get most of the information about products and services they might want to buy from sources other than the direct sales force.

When the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) published key research showing that buyers have completed 57% of the purchase process BEFORE they call a supplier, they quantified something we know intuitively — B2B purchasers use the Web, peers, colleagues, online recommendations, and so on to determine needs and buying criteria. They call in the vendors when it’s time to compete on price.

How do you impact that part of the purchase process that represents almost 60% of the time your reps aren’t in touch with the buyer? With marketing.

Source: Corporate Executive Board

Source: Corporate Executive Board

Communications, messages, and content that you send to prospects — or that they find when researching issues online — affect the purchase process.  Prospects and clients see this information, and may pay attention to it long enough to shape buying decisions. The difficulty is how to measure this impact and allocate the influence of marketing activity appropriately across pipeline and deals. And use this influence information to understand which campaigns played the greatest role in creating an opportunity or closing a deal.

Most marketing automation gives CMOs and their staff the false impression that they can use technology to figure this out easily.  However, most tools can’t factor in subjective criteria — like what to measure and how to determine the impact of any particular element on buying — that affect the equation.  Frequently marketers give all the influence credit to either the first or last touch before the deal closes, but this doesn’t help to understand which activities help to move opportunities from stage to stage or play a significant role in the overall process.

Luckily, I think the good folks at FullCircleCRM are on the hunt for a solution to this problem.  Take a break and listen as Andrea Wildt, VP of Products and Marketing, and I talk about the need to allocate influence, why it is difficult to do and the pros/cons of different allocation strategies. I think you will conclude that a weighted allocation works best for those with the analytics and tools to support this analysis.  However, most other B2B marketers should start simple and increase their sophistication as sales becomes more comfortable with talking to marketing about the pipeline and their mutual advantage in making it stronger.

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To Choose Where You Play in the Market: Know Your Buyers Well

November 5, 2012 — Laura Ramos

What do MBAs need to know about Buyer Behavior?

During the past couple of years, I have had the wonderful opportunity to guest lecture at my alma mater, Santa Clara University, to new classes of MBA students. This is something I do twice a year at most, and I love to give back to the business school that kick-started my career in marketing.  My topic is Buyer Behavior and why it matters in B2B focused organizations, where keeping a direct sales force — or channel partners — happy and productive often becomes the primary focus of the marketing organization.

Tomorrow night, I will attempt to impart words of wisdom to Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s next class of unsuspecting scholars.  As always, I will ask them to share their reactions to my presentation by commenting on this blog post. Most Santa Clara MBA students are employed full-time at top Silicon Valley firms and many hail from technical or engineering backgrounds.

Which will make for interesting discussion, since my comments tomorrow evening will focus a bit more on the healthcare industry. I plan to talk about how — in my new role this year heading up industry marketing across Xerox – we are making online, social, traditional and (frankly) unexpected moves in this industry.  Unlike high tech, this is an industry where Xerox is better known for supplying copiers used at the nurses’ station or admissions desk than for solutions we bring to hospitals, insurance companies, government agencies and employers to help them simplify how each manages the health of its respective populations.

Segmentation, personas, and behavior profiling continue to be the tools that good marketers use to understand how and communicate why buyers purchase from technology suppliers. Increasingly, these tools also help marketing executives determine where to head in a strategic direction (e.g.  grow current solutions versus invest in new ones), define how an organization uniquely creates value and plan how – through market execution – to deliver that value to customers.

Today, I think many B2B marketers stop at segmentation and targeting when they answer the question “what type of buyer should we attract?” The temptation to put buyers in broad, all-encompassing categories is difficult to resist.  Marketers want their message heard by more people than fewer.  The irony is that less truly becomes more in many B2B marketing opportunities.

Better marketers (and their sales counterparts) understand the detailed, specific issues buyers face in their respective markets. They understand what motivates buyers and why one buyer’s needs are distinct from another.  This understanding makes it easier to engage prospects in meaningful conversation about how your products and services can help them. Demonstrating that you are part of a community focused on solving key business problems (not just trying to sell stuff) is also important to creating belief in buyers that it is worth the time to have a conversation with you. Personas are a primary tool to help you move from technology supplier to industry insider. Relentless study about who buyers are and what causes them to buy keeps these personas current and useful as tools.

This is the essence of the advice I hope to convey to this class of soon-to-be-MBAs.  I will see how successful I am at achieving this goal based on the comments I receive to this post.  Won’t you join me in reading their comments and seeing how I did?  Expand the comments link below and join the conversation.

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The Art of Evolving A Big Company Brand

September 5, 2012 — Laura Ramos

It’s pop quiz time, folks.  Quick, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say?:

BMW           (ANSWER:   ”The ultimate driving machine.”)

Nike            (ANSWER:   ”The swoosh.”)

Apple          (ANSWER:  ”Products designed to be incredibly desireable.”)

Xerox   –   Yeah, yeah… “The copier company….”

This little experiment into bad game-show trivia demonstrates how difficult it is to change well-recognized, deeply-ingrained brand perceptions.  For many people, Xerox will always be the copier company. Although half of our annual revenue now comes from helping other companies shed business process burdens and focus resources more on what they do best.

Last month, I had the pleasure of sharing some steps in my current journey, on the quest to move public perception of Xerox from the old to the new, with a great group of marketers at the ANA Business-to-Business Committee Meeting, held in lovely San Jose, California.  The basic objective of the presentation — that you can find here on Slideshare – was to explain how we adapt Ready for Real Business (our company communication platform) to specific industries (in this case healthcare) to demonstrate that Xerox has been — and will continue to be — about making business simpler. 

Can Xerox make the transition from “the copier company” to something more?

For marketers, the lesson is crucial – develop your brand and be true to it.  In the second half of the day, Intel presented its story behind the new “die” logo and brand image.  The presentation began by contrasting firms that struggled with brand image (think Burger King versus McDonalds) against their more successful counterparts.  I thought it was VERY interesting to have these two presentations open and close the day.  (Nice job, ANA folks!)

During my presentation, I explained how Xerox uses affiliate advertising to tell our services story and highlighted our surprising success with online video storytelling.  I then showed how we evolved this top-level positioning into what we call the “Freedom to Care” campaign, which features our engagement with conferences like TEDMED and the World Healthcare Congress, by engaging in earned and purchased social activity, and with MESC 2012 (the renamed Medicaid conference.)

Key lessons learned through these travels so far? I would say:

  • Be persistent, not impatient. Evolving a brand is a years-long process, so don’t whipsaw your strategy around if the immediate pay off doesn’t surface. 
  • Put the focus on your clients.  If your marketing talks about what’s important to their core business and to their customers, you will be more relevant and your message will get through faster.
  • Top-notch brands are disciplined. Marketers who steward them apply consistent effort and investment. And they are not afraid to be a bit repetitive in their communication.
  • Get everyone singing the same song.  In really big firms (those that have really big brands), cross-business line collaboration is key. Lead business lines by example, it’s easier than trying to be the brand police.
  • Digital technologies help to speed up the process. Of course, it’s always best to integrate marketing into a consistent set of messages and offers/promotions that cross traditional and online channels.

Did my message matter?  I think so -  the folks at ANA let me know today that attendees rated my presentation the highest of the day.  Yay for me, but more importantly “yay” for the marketers who can marry the art and science of brand evolution in ways that stay true to company value but adapt to changing times.

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How to Tell A Story…Watch This And Be Inspired

July 26, 2012 — Laura Ramos

B2B marketers feel challenged to create compelling content.  We blindly pursue writing headlines that makes potential buyers drop everything to click on our links or give us a call. Or we chase the two-sentence value proposition that magically opens the door for our sales guys.

What we miss sometimes is the power of a story to get our message across. 

Humans love stories.  We learn from them.  Stories are part of our DNA: ever since we evolved from grunts to language, we have sat around campfires — or dining room tables — and told stories that share experiences.  Storytelling is a profound way to convey information to others in a form that is easy to remember. But B2B marketers get caught up in explaining why what we offer is better, cheaper, faster, more exciting, or more innovative. We lose sight of how a simple story — told by another customer or an employee with real, first-hand insight– can make our message come alive.

Since March, I’ve shared a few of my experiences managing the Xerox TEDMED sponsorship. I’ve talked about my new adventures in corporate sponsorship, messaging to healthcare, developing advertising, and surprising delegates with something unexpected.  All of which flexed new marketing muscles in me.  Now I want to share a TEDMED moment that will affect you in a profound way.  

Watch this video from TEDMED 2012. It will change your life and strike a deep emotional chord. I know this because it did to all the people who listened that day. In this video, Ed Gavagan tells a gripping tale about the medical expertise that saved him after a random violent encounter. It’s 12 and 1/2 minutes and worth every one.

So watch it and don’t be tempted to bail out after the first minute or two.  Because, as presentations go, this one has a few flaws.  Ed stumbles around in his speech a little. He stands in one place. He seems a bit uncomfortable. He doesn’t make a lot of eye contact with the audience. He doesn’t use slides. He doesn’t have props.  He doesn’t use gestures a lot.

But what he does well is tell an amazing story.

At the risk of ruining the moment, here are 3 things every B2B marketer can learn from watching how Ed tells a story:

1) Be authentic. While the presentation doesn’t look rehearsed, it is. However, Ed tells his story from the heart and with rich details that make you feel what transpired deeply. You connect with his story at a very basic level. Transparency, honesty, and realism count so much more than polish. If you need to spend time on your content, do it on the former not the later.

2) Surprise your audience. Using a flashback as the main part of the story is an unexpected twist that draws you into the action. Sometimes not following a linear progression, doing the unexpected (like the way Ed inserts humorous moments into the talk), and challenging your audience’s preconceived notions create the most memorable moments.

3) Tie it all back together. There is no obvious ”in summary” or “let me review my key points” in this talk. Yet Ed elegantly draws all the storylines back together at the end to thank an audience made up of many medical professionals for being who they are in the world.

Watch the video and let me know what you see in Ed’s storytelling that B2B marketers should follow.  Share your thoughts. 

And if you really want to experience something poignant, listen to the 25 second Q&A at the end of the session (the shortest one of TEDMED 2012) where Jay asks Ed to explain the real reason why the surgeon didn’t cut his long hair…

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What Can Marketers Learn from an Innovation Powerhouse?

June 18, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Courtesy of ITSMA and PARC, A Xerox Company

Xerox PARC.

The name is synonymous with “innovation”.  Since it’s founding in 1970, this research center has pumped out a wealth of ground-breaking inventions: laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented computing, and so much more. Spun-off in 2002, PARC (as it’s known today) is squarely in the business of developing new breakthroughs in technology for commercial and government partners including Xerox.

What can a research think-tank like PARC teach B2B marketers?  Quite a bit.

Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum in Napa. While CEO Dave Munn and company put together another spectacular agenda (you can review the tweet stream at #ITSMAmlf12), that they asked Lawrence Lee, PARC senior director of strategy, to talk about how to become and stay innovative was an insightful move.

Sure, I happen to enjoy office space at PARC and to hold a warm spot in my heart for this Silicon Valley institution. But let’s walk past my little biases for a minute. Lawrence’s talk was particularly relevant to B2B marketers because good CMO’s spend a lot of time collecting and sharing customer insight. By studying customer behavior and pain points, good marketers uncover non-obvious opportunities to solve problems and create new business – like researchers at PARC do.

To achieve this, Lawrence explains, it’s important to create a learning mindset in marketing where taking calculated risks is part of the culture. PARC manages research projects like a good VC or stock broker manages a portfolio of investments.  Top marketers today must also manage a portfolio of activity aimed at increasing consideration and deal opportunities.  Fundamentally, both activities are pretty similar.

Courtesy of Lawrence Lee, PARC, June 2012

In the digital age, the marketing portfolio has become quite broad. Many marketers struggle to find the right combination of program tactics that move the needle on demand creation and sales enablement.  It’s never one particular approach – like creating a Facebook page, buying the right email list, or running a world-class event or Web seminar – that brings in the prospects.  Instead, marketers make the biggest impact when they take a consistent, investment-oriented approach to engaging customer and use different elements of the marketing mix to target buyers at different stages of the purchase cycle.

Using the figure shown here, Lawrence shows how PARC categorizes projects in four distinct risk/reward profiles. This helps PARC balance its need to make new breakthroughs against the requirement to drive new business.  Marketers should take a similar approach to deciding which marketing programs to pursue and which to abandon.  The matrix of risk/reward criteria for marketing may look slightly different, but each quadrant should include activity dedicated to:

  • Core – engaging with current customers to keep them well-informed, engaged with your company, and advocating for you.
  • Next-Gen – looking for new opportunities to cross-sell or upsell current customers and continue to add value to your relationship.
  • Scouting – building awareness, consideration, and trial with net-new customers for your existing products and services.
  • Options – investigating new opportunities in break-out, brand new markets that complement where you are now.

Determining what percentage of the marketing mix to dedicate to each area is an important consideration.  I recommend you put a healthy dose in Scouting, with Core and Next-Gen following. Never completely overlook Options, however, because new opportunity is often where true growth gets started.

It was fascinating to see SAP CMO Jonathan Becher’s presentation the following morning where he showed how SAP puts the innovation portfolio concept into practice.  Based on technology from an acquired company, Jonathan demonstrated SAP’s marketing dashboard that provides an online way to view, manage, and communicate activity health across marketing programs by region. This dashboard also helps to show the impact the tracked campaigns have on the pipeline.  Whether he intended to or not, Jonathan mixed together the PARC theory with SAP practice to really make the agenda hit home.

There were many other presentations — on balancing the demand generation equation, using simulation games to get to know your buyers better, creating stories, short messages and online demonstrations to embrace the customer perspective, and navigating the uncharted waters of marketing transformation — that were equally interesting and informative. Thanks to all the great speakers and attendees at the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum. Your participation made it one of the premier events for me this year.

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Wow! I’m a Top 25 Digital Marketer Nominee Again

June 12, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Thank you, BtoB Magazine!

Oh my goodness!  I’m so humbled and thankful.  For the second year in a row, BtoB Magazine has nominated me as one of their top 25 digital marketers.

All I can say this year is “Thank you!”  I appreciate the recognition far more than I can say in words.

During the past year, I have learned a lot about marketing to an industry through a major corporate sponsorship and advertising.  Check out prior posts about the Xerox TEDMED relationship and the new Xerox corporate video to learn how we are focusing more on key industries like Healthcare to tell a holistic story in the online world.

Join me in congratulating all the other deserving nominees, including my special friends Petra Neiger, Kevin Cox, and Belinda Hudmon.

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Thanking TEDMED Delegates for an Inspiring Event

May 27, 2012 — Laura Ramos

TEDMED and Xerox Thank Delegates for an Inspiring 2012 Event

How do you leave an impression with over 1700 attendees of TEDMED that is both surprising and personal? Between two and three weeks after the extraordinary event that was TEDMED 2012 concluded, participants received a large, sleek black envelop in the mail. In it came a simple quote, suitable for framing, that speaks to the spirit and inspiration that is at the center of all of  TEDMED.

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.  We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”  — Albert Schweitzer

Cosponsored by TEDMED, Xerox sent this art object to delegates as a way to say “thank you” for being a part of this year’s event and for adding their voice to the thousands of discussions and debates that made TEDMED an immersive, engrossing, and utterly captivating experience.  The quote was wrapped in crisp, white linen which carried a small, personal message to each recipient.

Getting to this result was both gratifying and exhausting. The experience taught me a lot about what inspires me and how the path to inspiration is not always smooth and straight.   Here’s a quick synopsis — and a little “behind-the-scenes” look — at how Xerox, through its fantastic partnership with TEDMED and our creative agency, Pappas MacDonnell, iterated through this process:

1) February: TEDMED plans to hold a Sponsor Celebration Party on the last evening, Thursday, April 12th, at the National Building Museum. Total number of attendees may reach 1,500 and Xerox would like to present each guest with a small gift/favor as they depart the Gala that will leave a positive lasting impression of Xerox.

2) Criteria: Gift should provide a human touch and evoke an emotional reaction. Gift should not require elaborate assembly. It should be consumable or easily portable with a reasonable price point. It must require the recipient to interact with it.

3) The intended experience: Imagine 6 to 10 ambassadors lined up at the exit area hand out the gift, bid each guest a fond farewell, thank them for attending, and personally hand them a token of appreciation. The overall experience is genuine, warm, gracious. It’s an end to a wonderful evening; the gift is a reminder of the time spent together. (Note, while this sounds great, it did not happen as planned.)

4) First round: Agency selected a number of whimsical, packaged food items to meet the above criteria. As TEDMED’s gala plans evolved, we found that early gift selections competed with the extravagant desserts designed for the event. Late in March, we scrub the food gift item and go for something that combines art and experience. We also want an item that we can hand out at the end of the evening. We selected the Schweitzer quote – that also appeared in the TEDMED brochure — as the centerpiece of the experience.

5) Conclusion: Logistical problems prevail and we decide to send the art/gift after TEDMED concludes.  We also decide to add the matte/frame and to make the item of sufficient size so that it doesn’t get overlooked in the mail room.  The result is what you see in the image above.  There were countless other steps required to design and approve the artwork, color selections, embossing, packaging materials, mailing lists,  and postage costs! 

The result, we hope, is a surprising and inspiring touch from Xerox that shows all TEDMED delegates how honored we were to join them this year, add our voice to the conversation about the future of health and medicine and show how we intend to engage in the dialogue going forward. Anecdotally, we heard positive responses from those who received the gift.  If you received one, post a comment here to tell me about it. Were you surprised?  Inspired?  Did you hang it on your wall?  Let me know.

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A Solid Communication Platform? TEDMED Ad Shows How It Works

May 7, 2012 — Laura Ramos

2012 Xerox Corporation – All rights reserved.

As the Xerox mistress of TEDMED last month, I learned a few lessons about how a strong communication platform can help create a distinctive brand voice that delivers a consistent brand message. The Xerox TEDMED 2012 program advertisement (shown here, since it only appeared in print during the conference) had one simple objective: convey our support, in a thoughtful sponsorship message, for the event and its purpose. 

While creating a “proud sponsor of” message may sound easy enough to accomplish, several other communication objectives come into play when deciding exactly how this ad should look and what it should say. The ad also illustrates what a solid communication platform can do to inform a campaign and why communication platforms are an important prerequisite to any marketing program.  A bit of background may be helpful before sharing what I learned from working with the Xerox team and our agency on this ad.

“Ready for Real Business” is what we call the Xerox master brand communication platform. It’s not a tagline, but a platform that tells customers what we do and what we provide – technology and services that help you manage your business functions better so you can focus on what you do best, your core business. It defines the rational or emotional territory that the brand intends to own over time. It forms the foundation for how we act, sound, and look in all internal and external communications. It frames how we do this in a consistent manner while providing the flexibility for each product and field marketing function to accomplish its goals.

While this simplifies the process a bit, to activate the platform you must answer three key questions:

  • What do customers do? What is truly core to their business?
  • How does Xerox help our customers do this?
  • How do our customers benefit as a result?

How well does the TEDMED 2012 ad accomplish this and meet the requirements of the communication platform? Pretty well, I think.  (Special thanks to Jason Bartlett here at Xerox, and the Roberts Communication team, for all their hard work that really hit the mark on this ad.) Here’s how I see it address each of the three key questions:

1) What’s core to the business of healthcare? — “Caring for people is the real business of health care.”
2) How do we help do this? — “…by working behind the scenes to free up resources and simplify the way people work.”
3) How do customers benefit? — “… ensure they have more freedom to deliver the level of care that everyone deserves.” (The last question/answer also supports the key TEDMED theme of exploring how to make the future of health and medicine happen today.)

Through the image and headline, the ad also creates a connection between a diverse audience of practitioners, medical students, entrepreneurs, public officials, educators, researchers, and administrators and Xerox, a company with a serious commitment to the healthcare industry. Rather than stethoscopes and scrubs, we picked an image that is medical but ambiguous — he could be a physician, researcher or other healthcare professional. However, he is someone intent on his activity and serious about what he is doing. Alignment between audience and message was really key here and hard to do when you bring other factors — like art selection with unlimited rights at a reasonable cost — into play. The headline is straightforward in its attempt to connect Xerox to the TEDMED audience by saying “Just like you, we’re here to make things better.”

The key lesson for me is about using language and imagery to evoke an emotional response, and how to do this while getting a message across that fits the parameters of a very specific communication platform — one intent on preserving the integrity of the Xerox brand. I have to confess, I’m an old product marketer. I’m all about the facts and getting straight to the point.  Isn’t that what B2B marketing is all about?

Who needs emotion to do that?

I think the ad demonstrates a beautiful answer to the question. It shows how you can deliver a message (Xerox is proud to sponsor TEDMED with a passionate commitment to the healthcare industry) in a simple, elegant manner that creates a warm, human bond with the reader. It’s a lot for one little ad to accomplish, and it think it does it quite nicely. I also think its a lesson more B2B marketers could learn: how to connect with prospects and buyers in a way that goes beyond jargon and hype to show how you really can help customers improve their business.

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Anatomy of a Corporate Video…Xerox Makes the World Simpler

April 27, 2012 — Laura Ramos

From “A World Made Simpler” – all rights reserved Xerox Corporation.

What happens when a globally recognized brand needs to change what it means?

This is the fantastic challenge facing our CMO, Christa Carone, as Xerox evolves from “the copier company” into something more – a company dedicated to providing simple answers to complex business problems.  Last week, Xerox introduced a new video that highlights how where the company has been shapes where it is today and where it will go tomorrow.

Through advertising agency Y&R, Xerox teamed with visual storytelling studio, Psyop, and production company, Blacklist, to produce “A World Made Simpler… by Xerox” – a 2-minute video that uses printer paper, stop-motion photography, and a bit of computer-generated graphics to tell Xerox’s story. I think you will be surprised to learn what the copier company does to help doctors monitor patients and deliver better care, set up call centers during natural disasters, provide tamper-proof drug packaging, and make public transportation easier.

Xerox also published a “behind the scenes” look into how Y&R, Psyop, Blacklist and the Xerox team produced this video.  As you watch both the original and the background versions, I think there are a few key lessons B2B marketers can learn about storytelling and why video is such a compelling medium in B2B communication:

1) History matters – so stick with it. Chester Carlson invented xerography almost 75 years ago for one simple reason: finding an easier way to replicate and share information. Xerox embraces this legacy by using what people know us for — paper — to tell a story about what most don’t know us for — providing services that make business simpler. Many will look at the video and say “it’s all about the paper” — which is exactly the point. Having a strong sense of who you are as a company helps you to remain true to your brand identity even as that identity changes. And it also makes for a mesmerizing experience as you watch to see what the paper will unfold to reveal next.

2) Video illustrates intangibles. The value of IT services — and why a company would outsource parts of its business to another — is sometimes difficult to understand. Rather than bury the message in meaningless techie jargon or hyperbole, the video uses concrete examples of ways Xerox solves customer problems (without specifically naming names) to show how we’ve moved beyond our technology roots.

3) Emotion and B2B marketing are not mutually exclusive. The production of ”A World Made Simpler” is inspiring and surprising without being overbearing or maudlin. It evokes an emotional response to some very important problems that we relate to easily.  

If I have any criticism, I wish that the behind-the-scenes explained more about the motivation behind developing the spot.  Xerox bought Affiliated Computer Services in 2010 to expand business opportunity beyond its document reproduction origins, but now faces the challenge of communicating the new Xerox without losing the old. That’s the business problem behind a story worth telling.  A bit more transparency into that challenge would make the “inside view” video more interesting to me than watching technical details about the production. Alas, a fascination with technology is something Xerox will never leave behind, and the how-we-did-it video remains true to this cultural quirk.

Video also represents a great opportunity to receive peer recognition.  Congratulations to Barbara Basney and team for winning AdWeek’s coveted “Ad of the Day” for A World Made Simpler. Watch both and let me know if you agree — it’s the right step toward writing a new chapter in the Xerox brand story.

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