Category Archives: Marketing Mistakes

Magnificent marketing mistakes recorded online for permanent humiliation purposes

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 →

Fiat Folly

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My dictionary defines fiat as “an arbitrary decree,” which makes redundant a recent Fiat motorcar advertising campaign. A stylish bimbette and a bubble car landed in my lap this morning, all combined in a ten panel fold-out mailer from Fiat that pimped their 500 series micro machine, which looks like the bastard child of a Mini Cooper and a Volkswagen Beetle. Therein Fiat attempts to differentiate this vehicle by linking various models of their rolling soap bubble with various luxury brand names (Note to Fiat: It isn’t a luxury vehicle if you drive with your knees in your chin). The Gucci edition was shown with the slinky blonde draped across the hood, her impossibly long legs escaping from abbreviated shorts and her top strategically unzipped. Ironically the photo caption read “European model shown” which could have applied to the vehicle or the vamp. I have no idea from what rented … Continue reading →

Break Down

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation. Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy. Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one. Next comes an entry in the dead pool. Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational: Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation … Continue reading →

Founder Delusions

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“Can you help us break past our plateau?” was what the tech company founder asked me … the first time. This eventually became an enjoyable question after a decade of marketing consulting. Every so often, a founder calls the Silicon Strategies Marketing offices with a plateau complaint. I noticed various patterns with one uniting theme; that founders were all nearsighted and unable to focus on anything but the tree directly in front of them. Those different founders were at different points in corporate growth, and yet they all suffered from market myopia. If your revenues are stuck and no amount of money seems to move them higher, then ask yourself if you might suffer from one of these founder delusions. Primary Founders Delusion — the untested idea: Most tech products come from a founder identifying a feature or product niche through their insights into technology and some aspect of business … Continue reading →

Saturation Silliness

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“Our market is mature, and is saturated. We have to steal customers from our competitors.” There are some absurd technology marketing truisms, chief of which is that anything is so static that a market won’t and cannot be changed. Resting on the notion that there is only one recourse to growing a customer base means certain cerebral sediment has set — that market leaders don’t. When your market is saturated, you should think about changing the market or at very least adapting to changes in and connected to your market. First, no market is ever saturated. New companies come to life every day. A start-up limping along on open source and big dreams will be tomorrow’s Twitter and will need products they cannot afford to buy today. Freemium models work well in markets where long-term customer nurturing can be guided and automated. More mature companies occasionally switch technologies tied to … Continue reading →

Failing Innovation

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Avoiding bad markets is half the battle. Annually I see multiple software vendors pitching products designed to improve the performance of computers, databases or networks. With few exceptions, these tools disappear within two years because the underlying commodity (computer server, network connection or DBMS) becomes faster and cheaper. One of the most common technology and marketing mistakes is to create a product for an industry that will inevitably correct the problem. Take home Internet connections (please, take mine and bring me FttP). Long, long ago — about 20 years back — having a 4,800 baud modem for connecting to the Internet was considered state of the art and painfully slow (recent college CS graduates may have to look-up archaic words like ‘baud’ and ‘modem’). Without fail, once every quarter, someone pitched a software solution for raising the data transfer rate across antiquated telephone technologies. The following quarter a faster modem … Continue reading →

Do Not DIY

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Don’t try this at work. A discussion recently erupted within an online marketing mavens’ forum. Someone wondered if Do It Yourself (DIY) market research using social media would eliminate more traditional forms of research and many of its freelance practitioners. I responded that amateur efforts create amateur results, and that SMBs would thus find new and exotic ways to stay small through inappropriate research. Oddly, everyone agreed with me, which is surely a sign of the End Times. Services like Survey Monkey have created a great deal of poor research because research is a scientific pursuit and Survey Monkey is a digital chemistry set for DIY researchers. The internet is now littered with invitations to participate in surveys, and as a result people have grown numb to these invites (which makes our research work here at Silicon Strategies Marketing more difficult). Sadly, the results obtained by ad hoc surveys and … Continue reading →