Category Archives: Product Marketing

Suffering Surveys

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I thought my client had stopped breathing. We were going over elements of a large-scale survey he wanted Silicon Strategies Marketing to do for them. The mechanics were fine, the methodology was agreeable, and the timelines were A-OK. But when the cost to incentivize respondents was presented, I momentarily mistook his slacked jaw expression as a sign of a cerebral stroke. He quickly reached into his desk draw, took a slug from a flask, then asked if the incentive amount was a typographical error. The benefit behind primary research is that it delivers precise answers about your market. Surveying remains the best way to build quantified business cases and MRD‘s. However, surveying on the cheap produces unreliable results, and surveying in some ways is getting more expensive by the minute. The basic problem is that unless the subject matter of a survey really excites people, they would rather not invest … 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 →

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 →

Cisco Kids

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Cisco CEO and Cheerleader John Chambers has a gift for understatement. In a recent mea culpa of insight, Chambers declared that Cisco had “disappointed investors and confused employees.”  This is akin to saying nuclear bombs annoyed some Japanese during World War II.  As evidenced by the chart on stage right (click to enlarge), Juniper Networks has been soaring, the tech heavy NASDAQ has been rising, and even the leadership spasmodic Hewlett Packard has been doing better than Cisco in terms of share price. And with little wonder.  Cisco, the once (and maybe future) king of network plumbing did what many large companies do, namely make the erroneous decision to diversify.  Diversification is not inherently incorrect, but it makes sense mainly for consumer products, markets where brand consciousness requires different brands for different products or price points, or where the primary market is completely tapped.  Cisco did not face a saturated … 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 →

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 →