Motorola's Marketing Follies Don't Help Its Story

Alan Murray in yesterday's Wall Street Journal cites a study done by Laura Rittenhouse that ranked Motorola's (MOT) shareholder letter 94th out of 100 letters from big companies last years in terms of candor and information provided. We could have told Alan that (and in fact did last week), but we aren't ex-investment bankers like Ms. Rittenhouse. Regardless, I loved Rittenhouse's citation from the 2005 Motorola letter:

Motorola's going to own Seamless Mobility, where today's hottest technology is converging -- where the Mobile Me lives -- where mobile broadband means everything everywhere and anything anywhere.

If that isn't blah-blah, I don't know what is.

To be fair, though, Zander probably is suffering from the "Curse of knowledge", a malady nicely articulated in the book, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. They define it after describing a psychology experiment where "listeners" struggled to guess songs whose rhythms were tapped out on a table by "tappers". The problem: the tappers already had the tune in their head and the listeners didn't. And CEO's have the same problem:

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.

The tapper/listener experiment is re-enacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value" [or "where the Mobile Me lives"], there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.

It's this curse of knowledge that makes communicating hard. Let's hope Motorola gains a little more knowledge -- namely that they need help to communicate their story better -- before the shareholders stop listening at all.

Comments

[Tom B]

Back in the days when MOT's most important product BY FAR was PowerPC, you had to wade through 3-4 levels on their home page to even figure out they were a chip company. That kind of said it all to me.

[bobbyjoe]

Interesting article. It also gives Zander the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that he in fact does know what he is doing but is unable to articulate it to shareholders. However, I consider that failure to be just as significant. A big part of a CEO's job is getting other people in the organization to believe in a vision. If he can't clearly articulate his vision for Motorola to shareholders then maybe the employees are equally confused.