My web hosting company is a pest (I don’t want to out them, but let’s just say their name rhymes with Juan and Juan). In a few instances I consulted to a software company, which my web hosting service now resells. Thus, when my hosting company called one day to sell me on their “new and amazing” SaaS offering, I was amused.  I politely told the telesales monkey about my history with the system, and suggested that I was not going to be a customer. Then they called again … and again … and again. Eight times, and during each episode I asked with growing bluntness that they not disrupt my future days. They called this morning. Promotions, and the abjectly unpopular telesales routine, are essential to business. Making people aware of your products and value propositions are required as the first step in the marketing process. But like a … Continue reading →

I saw a grandmother reading her Kindle this morning. A seismic shift is occurring in the publishing industry, and before all is done a great deal of corporate blood will be shed.  Nimble organizations will survive and perhaps thrive. Old institutions will die.  The very nature of content is forever changed, and as always, marketing people are both over and under reacting. Electronic book reading devices (e-readers herein) are getting very successful.  Some reports have e-book sales at 20% of the market, shaving a few years off industry predictions.  One interesting tangent to this is that e-book readers buy more books than people who thumb-through dead trees (and will phrases like ‘thumb-through’ exit our vocabulary?).  This is in part due to the retail price of digital books being about half that of paper, and thus there may ignite impulse purchases, such as is the case with single MP3 files as … Continue reading →

Cheap marketing research is like a cheap date:  Sure, you have a transient and temporal moment of involvement, but nothing longer term ever comes from it and it can lead to nasty infections. This comparison recently came to mind when a client asked if there was any way we could scale back a proposal for performing market research.  As with most everything else, market research presents a tradeoff between cost and quality.  The results from seeking inexpensive alternatives are the same.  A discount paramour might deliver a life threatening disease and discount market research could deliver a fiscal death sentence. Either way you get … well, let’s not go there. Many miss three essentials about market research, namely qualitative breadth, quantitative depth, and statistical strength.  If any of these three elements are missing, your market research will lead you astray.  Hence, anyone attempting to understand their market needs to commit … Continue reading →