Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Reputation Rehabilitation

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It hurts to be disliked.  When a whole market thinks you stink on an ice floe, you have polar bear sized problems. A client recently engaged Silicon Strategies because the market didn’t think much of the client.  Though their software was considered ‘competent’, it was also thought of as based on the previous century’s technology and was not rapidly updated.  Our client had a well deserved and growing reputation of holding onto former glory and not keeping up with new millennia mentalities.  In short, the market had assigned them a negative brand. For them, exhibiting at events was like walking into a singles bar and watching every woman in the joint walk out. Our client faced this difficulty while preparing a new product which, at very least, brought them to par with competitors in important market segments.  From experience we knew that merely introducing the product was not enough — … Continue reading →

Segmentation Sanity

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Segmenting your market is like assembling a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle … where some of the pieces are missing, none fit together very well, and a few might even be from a different puzzle. I was reminded of this madness thanks to two separate clients. One is in the energy trading risk management (ETRM) software space and the other is in language services. Very different industries, very different customer verticals, hugely different buyer genotypes, and many of the exact same segmentation difficulties.  Their mutual difficulty was not in selecting relevant vectors on which to segment their markets, or divining the needs of any segment. The problem was the conflict between the theory of a segment and the reality. For example, one of these two clients had a subsegment that was largely untapped and, on paper, looked highly profitable. The reality was that most of this untapped segment contained companies that … Continue reading →

Up

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The concepts of “free” and “sex” sell more products than all other promotional elements, and if you are offering free sex people will line-up at your door. SaaS companies, among others, like “free” lead generation.  Most SaaS providers give away a limited version of their offering to collect people’s contact info and build long-term connections to the product.  Their grand scheme is always to up-sale freeloading bottom feeders into paid accounts.  Yet most SaaS companies have no plan of action for up-selling. It’s a SaaS underpants gnome problem. One of the problems is that online up-selling is a target moving faster than the one on Osama bin Laden’s back (we will get ya, boy).  Rules that made sense when Marc Benioff first started pimping Salesforce.com do not apply today.  There is no template, just a growing list of things to stop doing. The most prevalent mistake made in up-selling is … Continue reading →

Pulling Pathways

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“May I speak with Silicon?” Rarely am I stunned into silence.  Just ask my ex-wife or my congress critter.  Yet when I answered my phone in the middle of a rushed work day, and heard a clearly foreign voice on the other end asking for a person named Silicon, I was muted, torn between throwing a vitriolic fit of indignation or laughing aloud. I eventually opted for the former. After some ungentle queries on my part, it came to light that the cold caller was peddling web development services and was wondering if perhaps we might be in need of some.  Further interrogation (which at this point had become a source of amusement … for me, not the caller) showed that she knew nothing of my company, or business, our web site, or even the color of the sky given the distinct possibility that her call center was a dungeon … Continue reading →

Frictionless Clouds

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Sometimes technology is wholly too complex, a fact that HP has latched onto. In all product marketing, one pays attention to the ‘whole product‘, which is the sum of all the expected outcomes from using a product (this is a combination of features, benefits, services, price points, etc.)  Whole products are different for each market, each segment and each buyer genotype. Taken as a whole, a whole technology product can be very complex, and the complexity grows as the number of targeted segments grows. Technology isn’t for wimps. Thus, there is often a trade-off between a whole product and the product suited for new users (who can be considered a subsegment).  Often part of a whole product is offered as another whole product, but to a market or segment that is less sophisticated than buyers in the larger group.  Another common trick is to grease the skids for implementing a … Continue reading →

Research Riddle

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Being 100% sure of anything is not only impossible, it is durn expensive. Market research is a common conundrum for every business.  In a perfect world where coffee is always fresh, all women are drop-dead gorgeous, and government obeys, a businesses would buy plenty of primary research to be completely certain about their marketing decisions.  Not only would such circumstances stuff obscene amounts of money into my own pocket, but the risk side of the businesses risk/reward equation would drop to zilch and assure huge rewards. Sadly, complete research would cost a fortune and never be complete.  Even Oracle has to guess once in a while, rolling multi-million dollar dice on limited research and a hunch. Former Joint Chief of Staff Colin Powell — who led the rescue of Kuwait — once said something like “I research until I have 60% of all critical information, then I go with my … Continue reading →

Breaking Barriers

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I opened a box of Cracker Jacks and the toy prize was a cell phone. Not a smart phone, but a commoditized flip phone that handled voice conversations, kept a contact list and something that resembles a calendar.  A cell phone so fancy that two decades ago we would have taken a human life to obtain one, but today is so feature free that we might give it to a child so some day he can tell his kids how hard he had it. Markets change constantly, but often products change faster than the markets that support them.  Take the cellular carrier market … please.  Given that the domestic customer base is saturated, carriers are in a constant struggle to keep customers locked into their networks and find new streams of revenue.  Yet they must also help finance your newer and more sophisticated cell phones in order to bring you … Continue reading →