Category Archives: General

General thoughts on the marketing of technology

Marketing Manual

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You would be surprised at the risks founders take, though they have fewer risks starting today. I have canned and condensed twenty years of marketing strategy knowledge, insight, tactics and war stories into a new book titled the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual. This book has one goal — to make sure you have the broad perspective on everything that goes into marketing strategy development. If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will. In my years working for and consulting to companies about marketing strategy, one thing has become painfully clear — very few people know it all. One classic example was an early client of mine (who remains nameless), a post-IPO company doing a very late pivot. During a kick-off meeting I asked them “What is your segmentation model?” They said it was industry verticals, which seemed odd to me. When I asked them why they chose that model they replied … Continue reading →

Don’t Ask

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Don’t talk to your customers and prospects. Well, actually you should. But occasionally you will need someone else to talk to them on your behalf. Being very close to your product, your early adopters and your own hype, your company will be incapable of hearing everything people say. In this political season we see the usual raft of riffraff running for office (who did you just picture in your mind?). Largely preprogrammed in our beliefs, what a candidate says and what we hear are completely different things. Founders, marketing executives and especially sales people perform the same filtering based on their perceptions and experiences. If you don’t believe you do the same filtering, ask why you envisioned a particular candidate when you encounter the word ‘riffraff.’ This is where outsourcing qualitative research enters your strategy. Qualitative research is geared toward discovery, learning what people think and why. It concerns itself … 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 →

The HP Wayward

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27,000 people can fill a modest football stadium, which may be where HP holds their next early retirement party. In another spasm of realignment, Hewlett Packard announced that they were cutting nearly thirty thousand jobs and reinvesting in R&D. This lurched follows the amazingly abbreviated tenure of their last CEO who pledged to make HP a software company, which isn’t remotely a core HP competency (OpenView has been their single shining exception). This follows the scandal-terminated run of their previous CEO, and the “It’s all about me” administration of the one before that. It is good that Bill and Dave are dead, for the sight of what their company has become would kill them. Having cut my technical eye teeth on HP gear mumble-mumble-mumble years ago, watching them flop about like a landed flounder is depressing. The HP brand was built primarily on solid engineering, high quality products and a … Continue reading →

What is Expected

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I don’t expect much, and I usually get it. Expected outcomes are what buyers pay money for. Businesses and consumers lob lucre at vendors in order to achieve something, be it optimizing general ledger processes or smelling better. Expected outcomes, or expectations, are the foundation of all commercial relationships. I give you money and you make me smell good. If the cologne you sold me knocks buzzards off cesspool fencing, then my expectations have not been met. Microsoft and Hotels.com recently brought all this to light by failing to meet basic expected outcomes. When rudimentary requirements are not provided, customers become ornery. The soured relationship creates new friction to selling them more products and removes all incentive to recommend products to other customers (which in the long run is the cheapest and most effective promotional tool available). Knowing and delivering customer necessaries is so basic I find Microsoft’s and Hotels.com … Continue reading →

Doubtful Differentiation

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“That’s a dumb differentiation,” was what one bootstrapped founder said to another after both their investor pitches plummeted. Differentiation, the unholy grail of product marketing, shows that most people have unrealistic notions about what it is. In pure form, differentiation is anything that makes your product different. In practical form it is the difference that causes people to buy your products and not ones from your competitors. Just because your product is different doesn’t mean anyone wants it. Indeed there are three basic things that can be called differentiation. A product or feature can be different from everybody else’s, it can be better or it can be new. Yet, just because your product/feature is different doesn’t mean anyone wants those differences. Just because your product/feature is better doesn’t mean that people need it to be better, or you may not be ‘better enough’ to motivate customers switching to your offering. … 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 →