Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Slab Segments

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Cheap tables are a’plenty. Being a reformed gizmo glutton, I still receive a number of consumer electronics communiqués … hourly.  Most are for products I have no intention of buying, especially television sets that could cover my living room wall and still provide nothing considered entertaining.  Yet an occasional marketing lesson appears between engorged LED boob boxes and pocket cameras with more pixel resolution than the televisions. Today it was cheap tablet computers, or what I prefer to call slabs. Below those afore mentioned money wasters were a selection of slabs ranging from $129 to $320, and available with seven to ten inch screens.  This price range is a fair bit below the lowest end of the iPad 2 product line and the poorly marketed Xoom.  These slabs were not insufficient, sporting the same base memory, Wi-Fi and all the functionality of last year’s Android OS.  For customers lacking coolness … Continue reading →

Unextreme Exploring

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We can name many famous explorers, but can you name those that never returned from their expeditions? The unknown is the danger within every new territory. Venture into an unblazed forest and you may never find your way home.  The same goes for new markets, or even markets that are rapidly changing (the sense of panic is palpable in the book publishing market these days).  Yet marketing in virgin territories is not unlike exploring a new continent.  In each, testing is essential. When the pilgrims landed in what later became the United States, they did not make a mad Lewis and Clark dash across the continent.  They rarely ventured away from the shore and whatever rivers provided fresh water. In small steps, they set off in one direction for a short distance, blazed their trail and returned the way they came.  The next morning they would try a different direction.  … Continue reading →

Research Riddle

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The client was slightly stunned to see our proposal for conducting a market research survey.  He blinked twice, signed the contract, and asked if the terms included surrendering his first born male child. The good news is that we had no use for his offspring, and thus Junior was not part of the transaction. CEOs from start-ups and billion dollar enterprises alike balk at market research.  There is always a cost, and unless the price is three digits or less, they often hesitate to commit … until I ask them what the cost of failure is, and the contract gets signed instantly. The cost of failure fits nicely with our formula concerning market success.  The formal is beautiful in its simplicity, and reads: P(s) = 1-P(f) Or stated in English for those of your who forgot your college statistics class work, the probability of success equals one minus the probability … Continue reading →

MiSFiT

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Microsoft has lost it’s marketing mojo. Perhaps I should not base this analysis so heavily on their mobile offering, but having just returned from the massive CTIA event and witnessed Gates’ Goombahs slake Microsoft shareholder wealth into oblivion, I’m none too charitable.  Sure, Microsoft continues to milk the desktop cow, and the garner some gaming coin by Xboxing, but the world is rushing toward mobile and Microsoft is nowhere to be found. Literally.  Microsoft was so artfully concealed behind the Sybase booth (Sybase for cryin’ out loud) they were all but unlocatable.  It did not help that Microsoft’s booth manager squandered precious vertical real estate, apparently choosing a black funeral shroud for their flying buttress.  The booth itself was the Japanese/Swedish version of death décor — white and hard, modern, lifeless lines.  For an event soaked in the radical, consumer-focused “joy” of being wirelessly wired at all waking hours, Microsoft … Continue reading →

Free Thinking

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One of my favorite stolen lines is that customers should never be allowed to engage in unsupervised thinking. Unsupervised thinking is dangerous as any deposed despot will attest. Outbound marketing is entirely about communications.  It involves guiding the thinking of different people (buyer genotypes) at different times (sales cycle, product/market lifecycle) and for different reasons (aid discovery, educate, motivate, close).  Enterprise buyers engage in thinking throughout a sales process, unlike consumers who can often be sold through pure emotions. This came to light recently while coaching a client on a thought leadership paper, and one member of their team viewed the developing collateral as a sales piece, bemoaning the lack of mention about their product features and benefits.  I explained that buyers were an ornery lot, prone to cynical (and typically correct) suspicions. Adding product details not only distracts the reader from cementing their knowledge, but also raises alarms about … Continue reading →

Market Omissions

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Poking couch potatoes is useless. For as along as television cable companies have provided set top boxes, one or another technologist has pimped the possibilities of interactive television (iTV).  Some were horrible notions, such as Microsoft attempting to turn your TV into a dial-up terminal and thus annoying the rest of your family as you v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y surfed the Internet.  Others sought to enhance viewing experiences by offering multiple picture-in-picture angles of sporting events.  A few tried to make a buck by littering your TV screen with icons that would instantly purchase merchandise. They all bombed, and for the same reason (and continue to do so). The fundamental flaw behind iTV is that television was designed specifically to prevent interaction.  A couple of generations of boob tube bumpkins have stridently avoided interacting with their parents, spouses, children and reality.  Television was a tool for disconnecting the brain and thus decompressing … Continue reading →

Innovative Followers

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I love watching people fuss over false dichotomies.  Liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, Sane/Congress … This week’s dubious duo are Innovators and Fast Followers. In all industries, but in exaggerated form for high tech, there is a need to innovate. Mankind was built through innovation that allegedly improved life (fire did improve living though Twitter remains debatable). Many companies thrive on innovating while other lay in wait for innovation to occur and then compete through plagiarism. It can (and should) be argued that Microsoft rarely innovated anything, but made a tidy living by hijacking innovations from CP/M, Lisa/Mac, WordPerfect, and other also rans. Microsoft was the fast follower model to follow. This is not to decry the innovators. Apple grows consistently and has high stock price multiples not by dominating every market (aside from MP3 players) but from perpetually rethinking products. Collective gasps were heard when they introduced the Lisa (the Mac’s antecedent) … Continue reading →