Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Terminal Videos

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Video is a great marketing tool that people use poorly. The current vogue in online video, aside from cheap distribution of funny commercials on YouTube, is the animated 60-second-or-less landing page. These short videos relay the primary value proposition of a product, and perhaps some insight into how the product works. In the chain of discovery that buyers endure, this is the very first step — understanding why they should care about you. Short landing page videos give buyers a reason to investigate further. They then are forced to either divulge personal information in ham-handed calls-to-action (and risk getting a sales phone call), or wade through increasingly dense web copy in order to learn important product details. Why do companies stop using video after the landing page? This came to mind while reviewing case studies of Silicon Strategies Marketing clients. We once scripted a series of “deep dive” overview videos … Continue reading →

Simple Statements

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Dr. John, the King of New Orleans, sings a song that advises other musicians to “Keep That Music Simple.” The same concept applies to market messages. Rushing to tell every audience everything about your product leads to muddled messages. Your headline and opening blurbs have a 15 second shelf life before a reader’s attention wanders. Instantly connecting their motivations to your value proposition requires keeping the message simple. Oracle has a long history of being blunt in their marketing. Their magazine ads were once the most direct in the business, targeting techies and laying out Oracle’s performance superiority. Prospects instantly understood the value offered by Oracle and thus acquired a bias for the product. Instant believability based on instant cognition. For contrast sake, let us look at IBM’s top-line message for their DB2 database. It reads “DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is optimized to deliver industry-leading performance across multiple … 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 →

Abstract Agent

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God is a very abstract concept. Religion’s job is selling you on God. Metaphysical marketing, if you will. The marketing of abstracts and afterlives comes to mind as I slowly consume the pages of Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods. Regardless of your faith or lack thereof, we all agree that God is beyond human conception, which makes most religion a null program since its first job is to conceptualize God. Its second job is selling God, which in the realm of selling abstract products has been both the biggest project and one of the most successful. The success of religion comes from thousands of years of refined marketing, segmenting the market into a few million different sects, and following Seth Godin’s advice to agree with what people already think. Marketing new products into new markets is a bit like preaching to aborigines — they (the buyers/infidels) have no idea what … Continue reading →

B2B Buzzing

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.” Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word. B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process. Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics … Continue reading →

Social Service

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Facebook is your friend.  So is Google, just not a close friend that you share things with (aside from your GPS location if using an Android phone). Recently we performed a pro-bono experiment in association with a book launch.  Even though the author had a platform and a publicist who wrangled radio talking time, we deployed a little advertising using both Google and Facebook.  The results show why social media makes a difference, and how to move from static to dynamic in social environments. Over an 18 day period we pushed Google and Facebook ads which had the same creative layouts.  Viable keywords were selected with Google as were “interest” categories on Facebook.  For Google, the test was divided between taking clickers to a landing page on the author’s blog site or directly to Amazon.com after a few reader reviews had accumulated.  In Facebook all clickers were taken to a … Continue reading →

Don’t Compete

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If you are launching a new product, don’t bother competing. Unless yours is a new and completely untapped market, odds are you face stiff competition.  Studies by think tanks and corporations indicate that over time every market becomes dominated by three or four huge firms.  They have money, mindshare and enough marketing savvy to crush newcomers faster than the hot chick at the end of the bar crushes every cad with a sorry come-on line.  Going toe-to-toe with market gorillas is painful. I know from experience (well, at least a good analogy). For years I studied Krav Maga, the Israeli Defense Force style of hand-to-hand combat.  My instructor taught Krav Maga in the IDF.  He stood maybe five foot eight and might have weighed 150 pounds fully clothed … wearing boots, carrying a backpack and smuggling bricks.  Some of his students easily cleared six-two, massed in over two-forty and were … Continue reading →