Product Development and Direct Marketing in the Digital Future

By Fady Khairallah
President and General Manager, MDR

This year has been heralded as the year when digital publishing will come into its own…the year that technology finally moves into the driver’s seat to displace traditional methods and create significant change in the classroom.

Digital technology will inevitably alter the landscape of teaching and learning, as it has transformed so many other industries. The transition is a hard road full of opportunities and risk. Successful companies are not necessarily the first to act, but the ones that act correctly. That starts with the right product, but must be married with new approaches to marketing as an experience.

Process, Not Products; Simplicity Over Functionality

Technologists, me included, are burdened with our own version of Original Sin: a narrow focus on a product’s features and functions and not, instead, on how it’s used. This often creates marvelous engineering edifices that are commercial failures.

As your business moves into the digital realm, it’s important to understand how your information and product fits into the context of a classroom. You need to focus on the whole process of teaching and learning and how teachers and students interact with the information—when and how they need to access it.

Your product must either integrate seamlessly within the existing processes of teaching and learning or replace it in its entirety. Asking people to deal with complex, fragile technology, especially in the controlled chaos of a classroom environment, is a challenge that could make or break your product.

This is true of any technology adoption cycle. For example, at the turn of the century when electricity started to replace steam as a motive power in factories, the first electric motors simply replaced the steam engine, running a central shaft that drove the factory’s machines via belts. This was an inefficient setup, since a failure in any single machine resulted in the whole factory shutting down. It took 30 years before smaller motors were installed in individual machines, decoupling them from the main shaft and improving overall productivity.

This example is often cited as a bad application of technology, as if from the times “when we didn’t know any better.” It wasn’t. It was actually an incremental and non-disruptive way of introducing disruptive technology into a production environment. This approach reduced the risk and allowed the technology to mature and evolve in a natural way.

Additionally, success often depends on simplicity of design and robustness of the offerings, rather than functionality and features. If you have a couple of months of engineering time to spend, forget those four features a couple of your power users have asked for. Spend the time on bullet-proofing your product for the remaining 90 percent of your customers.

It’s the Experience, the Channel Experience

It was a lazy Sunday in October of 2000. The Dot Com boom was in full swing, the economy was in hyper-drive, and nothing could stop this Internet thing from “disintermediating” all the brick and mortar. I was taking my usual walk outside to fish the Boston Globe out of the rose bushes, never suspecting that the world was about to change. Tucked inside the 8-pound paper, along with a load of supermarket and car dealer inserts, was a shiny two-page flyer from Amazon.com.

The almighty Amazon, undisputed king of e-Business, with a stock valuation trice Barnes & Noble and Borders combined, using old media to reach holiday shoppers? Something was not right with the world! This approach ran against the conventional wisdom of the time. It turns out that the team at Amazon was smart enough, in those early days, to realize the potential for traditional channels to reach new customers.

In our roles as marketers, we must focus on the experience, not the medium. The medium simply enables the experience: a catalog/book is experienced in a different way than an email, a website, or a Google search. Each provides a unique opportunity to get a message across to a customer. A balanced approach that leverages the strength of each medium is the way to achieve success during transitional times.

Whenever I hear people announcing that the “old media is dead, long live new media,” I remember that little flyer. There is not old and new, simply a channel continuum, an ever-expanding list of ways we can reach and influence customers. Our job is to utilize these channels in an effective way and to maximize the ROI on our marketing dollars.

Remember, like weather forecasting, marketing is not an exact science. What works for me as a buyer may not work for you. And what worked yesterday may stop working tomorrow. And it will all happen quickly, so stay awake!

Our most potent weapon in this fight is not a specific set of to-dos but a test-and-learn attitude that presupposes nothing, tests everything, and relies on real-world data to shape real-world strategy.

WIM: What It Means

It is still unclear whether educational publishing has entered the disruptive phase of change. But one thing is clear: change is coming. Slow and evolutionary or quick and disruptive are not the relevant facts. What is relevant is that technology is changing classroom behaviors, and that change creates new opportunities for smart companies. So start with shaping your product to fit the way it will ultimately be consumed and insist on simplicity over complexity. Your marketing efforts should blend the old with the new and adopt a test-and-learn approach that maximizes your return on investment. As someone once told me: “in God we trust, everyone else bring data.”

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With over 20 years of business leadership and success in driving new business growth through innovation, Fady Khairallah is currently the General Manager of MDR, a Company of Dun and Bradstreet in Shelton, CT. Before assuming the GM role in April 2005, Fady served as MDR’s COO. Khairallah has driven an accelerated product development process and championed investment in sales and customer support to meet MDR customer needs. Previously, Fady served as COO of Sound Vision Inc, a VC-backed startup in Wayland, MA. In 2000, Fady founded Deligent, a web consultancy focused on creating state of the art CRM systems. Fady holds a B.S. in engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, and an executive M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.