Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

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 →

Al Natural Splits

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Start-up founder eyes cross when I ask “what is your segmentation model.” I often must resort to CPR to revive them. It is not that the concept is unfamiliar to them. Nor are they shocked into stuttering zombies due to weak mental stamina. It is that segmenting markets is unnatural to them, and often practiced in aberrant ways that make politics look savory by comparison. It is the unnatural aspect which throws both novice and veteran entrepreneurs. Image using industry verticals to segment the iPhone market, and you’ll instantly understand why some segmentation models are unnatural. (Brief war story: I once consulted to a firm that had a huge IPO, and then saw their basic business model crumble. During the initial consultation preparing them to enter a new market, I asked “What is your market segmentation model?” They reported it was based on industry verticals, which seemed odd to me. … Continue reading →

Cult Brands

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A cult is a religion with no political power. Tom Wolfe Cults are good in the context of marketing, though not so much in real life. Religions are slightly more respectable, though each views the others as large cults. Yet the mechanics of cults, religions and matters of faith are informative in shaping a corporate brand. The difference between fanbois and followers is thin. In the early iPhone era, Apple customers were called a cult. Early adopters of iPhones were evangelical to the point of annoying. Regardless of personal motivation, iPhone fans fawned and proselytized the new portable computer. While their numbers were small and their zeal was large, the cult moniker was apropos. With relatively no market (political) power, the iPhone faithful were as bedeviling as Jehovah’s door knockers. Today, iEverything is a religion because the masses have adopted most, and sometimes all of the doctrine. Cults, religions and … 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 →

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 →

Valuable Motives

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“Buy our features,” said the German software company representative. “You vill like our features.” The way he said it sounded vaguely threatening. More to the point is that nobody buys features, his or yours. Not in B2C markets and not in B2B ones either. Advertising features, and to a large degree benefits, misses the mark in marketing communications. The reason is that features and benefits do not describe what drives a buyer’s intent. What motivates buyers, both logically and emotionally does. Hunger provides motivation. So do natural sexual impulses (which often leads to children, which then launches a thousand new motivations, including the desire to find very dark and quiet places in which to hide). A person’s motivations force them into seeking ways to achieve something (their expected outcome) or make them instantly aware of a possible solution when it is thrust under their noses. That last one only applies … Continue reading →

Badly Branded

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Novell knew how to murder brands. A recent lunch with a long-term friend and SuSE Linux leader reminded me of the problems faced with messaging and branding in both commodity and fragmented markets. Linux is a commodity, and was intended to be such. The lack of differentiation in the core product was Linux’s primary selling point to shops that stayed stuck on one or another UNIX derivative or even proprietary operating systems. Creating unique brands for commodities can be tough, though we did have success with SuSE’s brand before Novell diluted it. The Linux market is becoming even trickier as advances in deployment and scalability expand. Today’s global content start-ups are rushing to EC2, RackSpace and RightScale in order to avoid growing pains while chanting hadoop and nosql. Less data-intensive operations use traditional clustering or stand-alone servers. Some people need real-time Linux, and a few folk want stripped-down distros for … Continue reading →