Author Archives: admin

Intent Investors

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Angels and VCs meet a lot of liars. Not intentional liars, but overly optimistic and undereducated entrepreneurs who slap together business plans that are best filed under “fiction.” To egotistically quote from my own book on the art of propaganda “We accept a modicum of lying when the negative impact is limited.” Throwing away a few millions dollars of other people’s money is not “limited impact.” Hence, VCs and other investors have developed a large set of buncombe detectors. After all, they are in the risk business — risking money provided by other people on relatively long-shot bets in rapidly evolving markets. Investors have better odds in Vegas, but Sin City payoffs are not as big. Trying to cash-in on the next Google requires VCs to lose quite a few bets. But like the card shark who took you for your last nickel, they play the odds. Many start-ups come … Continue reading →

Simple Statements

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Dr. John, the King of New Orleans, sings a song that advises other musicians to “Keep That Music Simple.” The same concept applies to market messages. Rushing to tell every audience everything about your product leads to muddled messages. Your headline and opening blurbs have a 15 second shelf life before a reader’s attention wanders. Instantly connecting their motivations to your value proposition requires keeping the message simple. Oracle has a long history of being blunt in their marketing. Their magazine ads were once the most direct in the business, targeting techies and laying out Oracle’s performance superiority. Prospects instantly understood the value offered by Oracle and thus acquired a bias for the product. Instant believability based on instant cognition. For contrast sake, let us look at IBM’s top-line message for their DB2 database. It reads “DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is optimized to deliver industry-leading performance across multiple … Continue reading →

Shifty Soil

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When the earth quakes, you either endure the trauma, relocate or eventually get swallowed by a gaping hole that appears beneath. Markets often have tectonic transmutations whereby old terra firma is relocated. This occurs with alarming frequency in technology markets — the upper rings of Hades are littered with tech companies that did not move quickly enough (you have long teeth if you remember names like Ashton-Tate and VisiCalc). Yet fault line spotting is a rare sport in high tech, and even catches change makers by surprise. One massive market plate is on the move, and television as we know it is about to disappear. Commodity broadband is making highly selective, on-demand video entertainment a reality. In the bad old days (last year) one consumed video entertainment by subscribing to ever expanding channel bundles packaged by cable and satellite companies.  The economics of broadcast television — where producers, networks, cable … Continue reading →

Leading Tech

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You can lead a company to market, but you can’t always make it think. Founder and CEO leadership are hot topics this month as we see Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO and HP appointing their CEO of the week. It is arguable that Jobs resurrected Apple from failed leadership and that HP lost its Way due to the same disease. Leadership — be it the valiant general in combat or a CEO on the battle field of the technology markets — is a very real substance and one unevenly distributed. All organizations are groups of people who either run in random directions and thus impede progress, or who head in one direction and cause change to occur. Leadership is pointing everybody in the same direction. However, the degree of leadership required and the goals set by CEOs varies wildly from industry to industry. The CEO of an iron … Continue reading →

New and Improved

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New And Improved is a wonderful slogan for soap. Not so much for enterprise software. Yet in the past year I have helped two major software companies with their go-to-market messaging for what was essentially New And Improved versions of their existing products. Noticing this brace of businesses had the unfortunate effect of forcing me to think about the essence of New And Improved market outreach — when and why it makes sense, when and how it doesn’t. When we examine the technology adoption lifecycle and the wave-extension variant thereof, we realize that much of technology marketing involves New And Improved products. We’re just smart enough not to call them such. In technology marketing, we see several forms of New And Improved products. One is new versions of existing products that have moderate improvements or extensions to the core expected product. Others extend functionality to make the product more competitive, … Continue reading →

Intangible Targeting

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The only thing worse than television shows about food are newspaper reviews about music. Food and tunes are pleasant assaults on our senses, using hearing, smell and taste buds to entice us. Rob a customer of those essential inputs, and the experience is no longer complete. Yes, Food Network pot roasts on your 52″ screen look yummy, but the lack of aroma fails to launch you from your Lazy Boy and to the supermarket in search of dead cow. Likewise a printed review of the new CD from an alleged rising star does little to illuminate if you want him croaking from your dashboard during drive time. Intangibles are the toughest thing to sell (as my mumble-mumble-mumble years in consulting have taught me). Selling things that lack substance — physical, worldly shapes and colors — requires associating the product with what people already know and have experienced. When Steve Jobs … Continue reading →

Fast Enough

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It pays to be second In the wide and weird world of business plans (and having sat on VC panels during start-up pitch parties, I have seen some mightily weird business plans) being a fast follower is the sanest approach. A fast follower lets another company prove that a market exists, then lets the follower rapidly become a competitor by mimicking the core features in their competitor’s ground breaking product while adding those that they missed. Risk is lower, development costs are lower, and if well timed you join the party at the moment early majority buyers raise their sluggish heads and open their tightly clasped wallets. I maintain that Microsoft made its fortune by being a fast follower. MS-DOS was a practical clone of CP/M which had proven that the personal business computer concept was viable. Microsoft also mimicked Macs when creating Windows and Apple mimicked Xerox’s pioneering of … Continue reading →