Author Archives: admin

Growing Up

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As many Americans prove daily, it is easier to grow wider than it is taller. Silicon Strategies Marketing is currently consulting with a company that has a fairly wide reach in their market, which is the foundational side of their industry. They serve companies at the middleman and retail level, and on a regional basis are fairly dominant, though they have both room for improvement and the option of growing geographically. Their other option is to go vertical, to begin competing with their existing customers and earn money they otherwise help their customers earn. The trade-off for companies in such positions is complex. To grow, a company needs to provide new value and by doing so attract new customers. Or they need to gather more customers of the type they currently serve, which typically involves taking them from competitors. The last option is to find ways of making money by … Continue reading →

Support Acrobatics

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“Its [sic] not necessary to upgrade Acrobat 7 to Acrobat 10. The other option is to downgrade the Windows [sic] to Windows XP.” I’ll assume for the moment that narcotics are provided free to Adobe’s technical support teams. The terminal quote above ended a support dialogue, initiated when an Adobe product commenced aborting after a laptop was upgraded from XP to Vista. Leave it to say that the support technician did not fully comprehend the complexity involved in reverting any operating system much less rolling back a laptop to a 10 year old OS. He also likely does not comprehend breakfast, water or autonomic breathing. When anyone buys anything, they have a set of expected outcomes. A collection of such expected outcomes is a whole product definition. When a single expectation is not met, a customer is dissatisfied. When two or more expectations are unmet, customers begin looking for alternatives. … Continue reading →

Ill-Lumina

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Launching a late-comer product into a maturing market is like pushing a salmon up Niagara Falls. Some folks (with perhaps a bit too much time on their hands) have estimated that about $450 has been spent marketing each Nokia Lumina sold … which currently retails for $49 (with the ubiquitous two-year contract). You don’t need an MBA to see that this is not an entirely profitable go-to-market plan. The Lumina was the first serious attempt to lift Microsoft’s mobile market share, and managed push fewer than two million of them into users hands (though it is uncertain if this includes the number of devices Nokia gave to AT&T employees in an attempt to evangelize in-store sales staff). There are about as many Android activations each day as Luminas now in use. The marketing puzzle that Microsoft failed to solve was getting consumers to believe that WinPhones were better gizmos than … Continue reading →

Psycho Marketing

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When it comes to marketing, is your company a guru, sportsman or warrior? This may not be an exhaustive list of psychologies, but these three traits cover most go-to-market plans and mentalities I have encountered in B2B marketing. They can be as individual as the CMO or corporate-wide traits. Each has its own operational MO and they apply well to different markets. Pitted against one another, any can win depending on the market they seek to exploit. With some overlap, market dominating mutts can be whelped. Gurus: Passive marketing, which these days is largely typified by social media marketing, is nearly spiritual. It seeks to affectionately coax buyers to come forward — encouraging, not pushing. Gurus play the long game and seek actual relationships with customers, and are willing to take time, invest effort and wait for returns. Sportsmen: These are people who keep score. Market share, quarterly revenues, and … Continue reading →

Funnel Fun

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I don’t believe in sales funnels. It isn’t that they don’t exist or that customers no longer suffer requisite discovery steps before making a purchase. I don’t believe in sales funnels because one of marketing’s missions is to eliminate friction, to grease the path to purchase. Eliminating levels in the prototypical sales funnel speeds revenues and early retirement. It turns sales teams into order takers. It makes companies famous. But it ain’t easy. For green marketers reading this memo, typical B2B sales funnels have a number of stages where, according to ancient lore, potential buyers fall out. The funnel concept was born in the old days when mass communications were the most common promotional tool. Theory said that you had to cast your lead generation net wide, gathering anything that smelled like a prospect, then toss aside those that failed tests at each narrower neck in the sales funnel. This … Continue reading →

Social Shortcomings

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Social marketing isn’t it. With humans living on the net, and with obvious advantages to social media manipulations as a marketing tactic, many people have happily abandoned other forms of promotions in favor of social. Later they unhappily abandon their jobs to fill slots in unemployment lines. Humans, being the quirky bunch they are, need a number of things to occur before a purchase. Most of all they need to perceive value in a product and believe the value will actually be delivered. Good marketers can create a brand (the basic value proposition) and awareness of the brand, then discover this is not enough. Alone, knowing a brand and that it makes a promise is weak soup that omits essential ingredients in the marketer’s cookbook. No wonder social marketing often tastes bland. To believe in a brand requires some form of “proof.” This may be fanciful or it may be … Continue reading →

Driving on the RIM

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When was the last time you heard somebody use the word “crackberry”? I recall a Southwest Airlines flight attendant uttering that abstraction when comically ordering passengers to turn off electronic gizmos. It was a period in history with Research In Motion (RIM) was, well, flying high. Their email push technology was new, hot, addictive for road warriors and earned a share price that startled even Silicon Valley investors. RIM stock has fallen 94% since then. RIM was a one-trick technology. It certainly filled a need, but offered something that was cloanable, and eventually obsoleted by mass adoption of wireless data plans. Today a cheap feature phone can make IMAP connections to any email server and deliver the same degree of digital addiction that once made RIM famous. Some analysts claim RIM is now worth nothing except the value of their patent portfolio. Success often breeds failure. Incessant laurel sniffing leads … Continue reading →