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An evening with Regis McKenna
Tonight I went to an event put on by The Entrepreneurs Resource Network, where Regis McKenna was the featured speaker, promoting his new book, Total Access. He is a good speaker, funny, and and a good storyteller. He also comes across as being very smart. I don't think that I can do justice to his ideas in a late night blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a new perspective on marketing after the night was over. Part of that is the history of marketing that he carries around in his head -- he spent a long time talking about what marketing was all about in the early 1900's -- distribution and enabling the consumer to buy. He also talked about how many more choices consumers have today than they had even 15 years ago. The statistic that stuck in my head was that WalMart now has 300,000 SKU's that they carry, and that WalMart updates the database of what people have purchased nationwide every 90 minutes. Holey Moley!
Regis McKenna closed with a funny story to illustrate how different the buying experience is today from the past, and what assumptions our kids are growing up with. He was driving somewhere with his two granddaughters, 7 and 9, and his father-in-law. His granddaughters were lobbying to have him buy them an iMac. McKenna said to his grandchildren, "but does the iMac come with enough software? - Maybe we should look into computers that have more software bundled in with them." The 7 year old replied, "But if I need more software, I can always get it over the internet", and the father-in-law chimed in with "Yeah, Dummy".
I don't know enough to recommend buying the book Total Access, at this point, although I plan to, but I can highly recommend going to see him talk while he is on the book tour circuit. Hearing him speak reminded me of what I miss most about not having a full-time job -- not getting to spend the day interacting in person with really smart people. Also, I was reminded how everybody is connected, especially towards the top of social and financial networks. While chatting with him after the talk, I discovered that he is having dinner tomorrow night with my old boss at GO Corporation, Bill Campbell aka "Coach", currently chairman of Intuit. They worked together at Apple almost 20 years ago. Small World.
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