Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Integrated Biased

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We’re all biased, even those who allegedly are not. We come by it innocently enough because our biases were taught to us. Some we picked up listening to our parents. Weaker minds are warped by politicians and pundits. Instincts are actionable biases learned through Darwinian selection. Brand marketing’s primary job is to teach bias to buyers and cause customers to favor one brand over others. But then again, I’m a little biased on the subject. Stripped of fluffy pseudo-psych speech, biasing is a Maslow tool, designed primarily to avoid risk and in more rare cases obtain self actualization or esteem.  Marketing’s job is to determine which direction (safety or self) will motivate buyers and then teach customers their newfound bias. Apple is masterful at instilling self-esteem bias in gadget buyers. IBM remains very good at selling safety bias to CIOs. Donald Trump is biased about his ego, and that manages … Continue reading →

Trust Me

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Trust me, I’m in marketing. If that line made your skin crawl, then you experienced an important aspect of marketing, namely a lack of trust (even Seth Godin noted an inherent instinct to distrust marketers). Where trust is lacking, so are sales. Mistrust prevents people from taking promotions, products and sales people seriously. It is an ancient survival mechanism adapted for modern ages. (Mis)trust involves balancing risk and rewards. For example, locales where gun ownership is low tend to have higher burglary rates, which demonstrates that even the dumbest of criminals weigh risk and rewards. If risk is low, humans will accept nearly any reward. Where there is any risk, escalating degrees of mistrust develop. You may hesitate a second before spending a dollar on a soda brand you have never tasted, but you’ll hesitate forever when encountering a pushy car salesman who guides you directly toward $70,000 Escalade when … Continue reading →

Biasing Buyers

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The oddest request I ever received from the head of a sales organization was “Can you stop promoting the product for a couple of months?” It was an old company with a new product that had gone nowhere before I took the reigns of their marketing department. I established a strategy that relied on precise market segmentation, focusing on the top two segments, then making buyers and strategic partners believe we were the only serious product in the market. Sales jumped 26% in the first year, we chased two competitors completely out of our target segments, and had a sales close rate above 80%. The poor sales folks couldn’t keep up with incoming calls. The strategy was to bias the opinions of buyers. This required them believing that we not only cured the generic problem (which our competitors did too) but we also cured the buyers personal job-related problem (in … 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 →

Authentically

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It was an authentic question. I shared coffee last week with a former boss who now is a VP at Google. He was surprised to learn that I founded a marketing strategy consultancy and had been successful at it ever since leaving his employ. He was curious how I promoted the business and was shocked to learn that approximately half of Silicon Strategies Marketing’s new clients come from the web. It all hinges on authenticity. Since the earliest days of snake oil, buyers have been wary of product claims. Anyone who has ever bought a used car is even more sensitive. Inexperienced marketers make unsubstatiated claims, and by doing so trash their corporate brands. The entire product world — both B2C and B2B — at times seem to lack any authenticity. People, pre-programmed as they now are, distance themselves from offerings that appear inauthentic. Which oddly enough explains iPods and … Continue reading →

Content Overload

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Have you had an overload of content yet? Don’t worry … you will. For all the great things our Internet enabled interconnections have given us, we pay by receiving gobs of completely useless content, most of which is apparently generated by green marketers and my Facebook friends. The number of bytes per second received by today’s average wired human now exceeds the number of bytes per second sent by all the world’s mainframes in the 1960s. Marketing content — especially HTML layered ads — is devolving into poorly targeted noise that is more aggravating than accepted, according to Content Blossom. People are tuning out in the same way they learned how not to watch TV commercials by 1958. Advertising noise has always been problematic for marketers, and the Internet in some ways is making it worse. Since marketers are responsible for much of this noise, they are creating their own … Continue reading →

Real SoLoMo

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Intersections cause collisions, but also opportunities. A basic marketing strategy is practice to find the intersection of what customers want to achieve (expected outcomes) and where the market is not providing that solution. Alternately, one can look for places where different technologies can, for the first time, be combined and create previously unavailable value. Smart phones are now ready to facilitate SoLoMo. The three raging factors in markets and marketing today are SOcial, LOcation-based apps and MObile. The real-time enabled combination of these three may well be the next major moment in consumer technology and marketing. The ability to reach people in tight geographical clusters, who are sharing an experience or looking for one, will be an exciting market in which to pitch. Social is about sharing. As witnessed by Facebook posts, it is the moment in which the user has the impetus to share that is important. What one … Continue reading →